Binary
by AllRoadsLeadTo
Summary: Jack Shepard and Alma Wade have been experimented upon for the last four years, now they've taken their chance for freedom and revenge. (Features other franchises)
1. Chapter 1: Jailbreak

Author's Note: This is a story I wrote on SpaceBattles and am now posting on , I hope you enjoy it.

Arc 1: The EscapeChapter 1: Jailbreak

Subject One pulled the bloody lab coat tighter around himself as he walked through the corridors of the 'research facility.' The plain grey walls of that were ubiquitous throughout the facility were unmarred in this area. Subject One liked to think that was because he had only just arrived here.

He knew that there would be guards ahead, and that they would be ready for him. After all, the flashing red lights and the siren wail of containment breach would make it obvious even to these brainless thugs that they should be wary. Though maybe it'd just give them a migraine like it did to him. He certainly hoped so.

Of course, the siren wasn't the worst part, especially not here. Nor was it the low rumbling that he was currently tracking down. No, the worst part was the high pitched, numbing hum in the back of his head. Of all of the things Subject One hated the most, it was that hum. It muffled his powers, numbed his senses and kept him from hurting and [i]_killing_[/i] the bastards that kept him (and the others, he supposed) there like lab rats.

Now he was going to destroy the Psionic Dampener, bust out Subject Zero, and make them choke on their own 'success.' He knew that he couldn't break out on his own, even with the riot as a cover, but there was one person who could break out, and break them. One person who they kept locked up in Quarantine 05, surrounded by Dampeners. He knew the number because he'd heard one of the scientists talking about it a month ago, when they'd sedated and locked her up after she killed what must have been at least a hundred people.

He didn't know her name, just that she was one of the younger and the most powerful psions in the program. Unlike her, she hadn't survived what must have been more than four years of experimentation and forced fighting just on luck and nerve. She had serious power, enough that shortly before she went on her spree, they had finally decided that after a year of her instantly killing any opponents thrown at her in the arena that they could learn no more from her fights. Subject One still felt lucky that he hadn't been one of the subjects that had to be forced into the arena to face her and certain death.

When he'd first been ship to this godforsaken facility on this godforsaken planet, he'd been thirteen, and when he saw her from a distance after all of the other subjects were moved into the Atrium, she couldn't have been more than four and they'd kept her separated from the rest, given her a lavish room and separated her from all of the other subjects. She had been special form the beginning. Everyone had hated that fact, including Subject One, but he'd seen how they had taken her away for testing just like all the others. And made her fight in the arena like all the others. He knew she had just as much of a reason to hate those people as he did.

That was why he was going to break her out. Only she was strong enough to escape through the gauntlet of automated defenses and guards that they had between the inner and outer facility.

Armacham was paranoid like that.

When Subject One had seen the turrets gunning down they people he'd fought and killed for the scientists' amusement, he'd been both grimly satisfied at their deaths for all of the suffering they'd put him through, in and out of the arena, and worried. After all, if even they in all their numbers couldn't force their way into the Security Complex, what hope did he have. Then he had an idea. A bad idea, but the only one that had a chance.

Subject Zero [i]_had_[/i] forced her way into Security, and then the offices before she was knocked unconscious by the tranquilizers that they used for her and only her, or at least that's what he'd heard afterwards. All of the other subjects had been locked in their cells at the time or had been gunned down by security.

She might not like him, but he was reasonably sure that she didn't like Armacham more. He refused to die, but was willing to gamble his life on what was likely his only actual chance at freedom.

And so he went onward.

~/~

Subject Zero came to a T intersection. The sign on the wall indicated that Quarantine was ahead, and Research Labs was to the left. Both held bad memories for him, but the Research labs held many, many more and much worse ones than Quarantine. The isolation of Quarantine 02 had been a blessed reprieve from the hell he lived through, but that had only been for their isolation experiments, to se how it affected psychics and he had come to dread in the dark timelessness of the coffin-like apparatus they had put him in almost a year ago.

Seeing no one down the hall continuing to Quarantine, he tried to reach out with his senses to determine if anyone was in the corridor to Reasearch Labs. Unfortunately, the interference from the dampeners kept him from getting a clear picture of the corridor, not that he had ever been good at extending his senses. It wasn't something his 'group' had been selected for.

Bracing himself and gripping the length of pipe another, stronger psion had ripped out of the wall and into one of the guards earlier, Subject One leaned to look around the corner. What he saw was simultaneously a relief and a concern. The thick security doors leading into the labs were torn open, exposing the glass walls and tiled floors within to him. However he did not see an empty corridor and lab. What he saw was blood and the bodies of scientists and guards scattered across the corridor. That was worrying. While it could have been the result of one or more of his fellow subjects, no one short of Subject Zero was that powerful.

The much more likely, and dangerous, explanation was that shades and been created or summoned or whatever by the psychic violence the other subjects were unleashing. Subject One peered carefully, breathing as shallowly as possible so as not to attract their attention. They occasionally appeared in the arena, and while their glowing red eyes made them easy to spot, the rest of their bodies were transparent except when they were being hurt, and their claws could tear through the guards' armor quickly, ignoring their kinetic barriers. All in all, Subject One did not want to encounter them in his current state.

After close examination, he saw that there didn't appear to be any disturbances in the pools of blood indicative of shades standing still, nor were there any floating pairs of glowing red eyes. Slowly and quietly exhaling, Subject One began quietly creeping across the intersection before he realized that with the door to the labs open, and none of the shades visible, they must have gone somewhere.

He bit back a curse which could have given him away. He was fairly confident that any shades present had not passed him, given that he had not fought or been killed by one. This left two possibilities. Either the shades had decided to hide in the labs for some inscrutable reason, or they had left for Quarantine.

Or some had left Quarantine and the rest were still in the labs waiting to ambush someone. He bit back another curse.

"No point in going back," he whispered to himself as he started forward, slightly quicker this time, though still trying to be as quiet as possible.

He eventually reached the corner, noticing the many bullet holes pocking the walls, floor and ceiling there. "Fantastic."

He looked around the corner and saw the destroyed auto-turrets and dead guards at the checkpoint. Apparently the barricades had not meaningfully help them. At least he wouldn't have to sneak past them, though the shades would be a problem, whoever many of them made it past.

He cautiously approached, watched for any sign that a shade had remained behind. He let out a deep breath when he saw the clear area at the top the long and wide descending stairwell next to the diagonal cargo lift on the other side of the checkpoint was clear save for some overturned tables and toppled crates. The lift itself had also descended into Quarantine, though he wasn't in an angle to see below.

He approached one the dead guards and looked at his assault rifle. While the heavy, face-concealing armor hadn't helped much, the weapon might be useful to Subject One. One the other hand, it was likely ID locked like all of the other Armacham weapons and would electrocute him if he tried to pick it up.

He almost kicked the weapon away with a curse before stopping himself, realizing that the sound could alert any nearby shades; or guards if they had won, they did have experience fighting shades here after all.

Hearing a loud boom which faintly shook the floor, Subject One decided that he needed to pick up the pace if he wanted to break out Zero before the guards restored order, or decided to flood the facility with gas or something. He'd taken a two gas masks and some medigel from the Subject Medical, next to the Atrium and the Arena, before the others looted too much. He was wearing one of the masks already, cutting off the smell of blood and offal, while he had been forced to use up most of the medigel when Subject 403 tried to gut him with a scalpel. At least One had managed to patch himself up with a makeshift bandage and the medigel.

Unfortunately he then used up most of the remainder of those leftovers trying to fix a several wounds inflicted by a shotgun-wielding guard who tried to kill him and the subjects coming with him. Only he survived that, and he hadn't done a great job patching himself up that time.

He sighed, and realized that he was wasting time thinking about how little he had. Then he gripped the pipe tighter and quietly stalked towards the stairs and the cargo lift, watching the crates and tables in case a shade was hiding behind one.

When he reached the lift he looked down the diagonal shaft and saw the empty lift at the bottom, but couldn't find any signs of violence down there. He went over to the stairs and started to descend, listening and watch all the while, trying to find any threats through mundane and psionic means, even if the dampeners in Quarantine muffled his abilities. The one by the arena had been destroyed shortly after the riot started and on the way to Quarantine had felt the effect lessen as the one next to the atrium was disabled as well.

When Subject One reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw no sign of the guards or the shades. He wasn't sure what this meant. However, he did see the most important part, the locked security door to Quarantine Maintenance 1. He wasn't sure what was in there since the dampeners where somewhere else, but he [i]_was_[/i] sure that breaking whatever was in there would be beneficial to his plans, or at least make him feel better.

Double checking that the coast was clear, Subject One walked up to the door and focused on his powers. Even with the dampeners he could feel the heavy locking mechanisms of the door, and taste the electrical currents running through the powerful magnets helping to hold it shut. He didn't have much power, but he did have a certain finesse honed from being one of the longest lived subjects in their sick program. So he sent out sharp twisting jabs into the magnetic locks, quietly breaking them one by one. Then came the hard part of opening the door, pushing it open. It would take all his focus, so he looked around to again make sure that no one and nothing had decided to sneak up on him.

Then he focused his mind on the task, concentrating as hard as he could on moving both the door and disengaging the lock at the same time so that it would slide open. This meant severing the connections between the motors and the network, and then mentally making their gears turn so that the door slowly pulled up and open. One if was all of the way, he didn't want to have to worry about crawling or ducking out in a hurry, he forced the bars that held the thick metal door in place into their sockets. He didn't want to have to open the door more than once and expediency overrode caution in this instance.

He walked into the Maintenance room which was very large and where an assortment of softly humming machines, pipes and thick power cables. Subject One grinned. He had known that this would be loud, but while he didn't exactly want to fight shades in particular, he had learned a certain bloodthirstiness and always enjoyed whatever opportunity he had to break or destroy things and Armacham employees.

He started lashing out with his mind and body, breaking delicate machines, severing the thick power and data cables, breaking pipes so water, coolant and sewage began to pour into the room, further damaging the machines. Cackling with glee as he broke more and more of Armacham's expensive equipment, he danced through the growing pools of mixed liquid and semi-liquids. He was already filthy, and had spent long enough at the facility to get used to it.

"AHAHAHAHA! TAKE THAT!" he cried out as he psionically smashed the last and biggest machine at the back, causing a small explosion to knock him into a pipe, knocking it from its already loose moorings.

As he collapsed into a pool of muck, the last of the humming died and the lights flickered out, leaving him in darkness until the emergency lights in the floor against the walls came on, lighting the wrecked room in red-orange light where it managed to penetrate the opaque pools. No white light entered to room from the unloading area either.

It was then that Subject One noticed two things. One, the ever present sound of the air filters was gone, and two, he heard splashing coming from the direction of the entrance to the maintenance room.

He picked himself up and grit his teeth, adrenaline rushes through his veins and the need to destroy and break things returning in force from its momentary abatement.

A solitary pair of glowing red eyes appeared above slashes as raced towards him. He was fairly certain he heard only the one, which was good, so he focused and threw a loose metal panel from one of the machines at the shade, which knocked it aside.

Subject One howled and rushed to meet the monster, swinging overhanded as hard as he could, Knocking the shade into visibility, its short, corpselike body being knocked into the slowly rising muck, he didn't let up, unleashing a flurry of blows upon the creature. However, it reacted immediately, lunging towards him, knocking him onto his back with a splash.

He screamed as its claws tore into his thighs and then released so that the shade could attack other parts of him. Not wasting time, he swung again, knocking it to the side where he shoved it into the wall with a psionic push. He knew from watching others that it was more resistant to psionics when it wasn't stunned, so he forced it into the muck with his mind as quickly pushed himself to his knees and then rained blows on its neck, head and limbs until it stopped moving and dissolved into ash.

Drawing a ragged breath and thankful that he hadn't been worse hurt, Subject One took a moment to listen for more splashes.

He heard none.

He nodded to himself and staggered to his feet, gasping as the burning pain of his cuts, which had been exposed to sewage and coolant, made themselves known.

Subject One cursed. "This is bad."

He leaned against the nearby wall and patted himself down, searching for the vial of the remaining medigel.

He didn't find it.

He cursed again, louder and longer.

Eventually he calmed down enough to think. "Okay, well I need to get some medigel to patch these up and disinfect, and the longer this goes on, the harder it'll be to fight so I need to break Zero out [i]now[/i] or there's no chance I'm walking out of here."

He took a roll of soaked bandages and squeezed as much of the muck out of them as he could before tying them tightly around his new wounds. He then straightened himself and limped out into the unloading bay.

It was empty again. "Good. Now I just need to hold it together until I find the next checkpoint, they've got to have something there."

He walked to the large doors which in the gloom were labeled "PSIONIC QUARANTINE."

The doors themselves were locked again, but with only backup power the magnetic locks weren't working, and these large doors opened to their sides, making it slightly easier to shift the several tons of metal. At least the backup generator had only enough power to support one dampener, making things easier and he repeated his earlier process to pry the doors open enough for him to walk through.

After taking a moment to catch his breath, which he abruptly cut short when he heard faint gunfire from up the elevator shaft, he pressed on.

Each Quarantine chamber had its own cubic half-kilometer of space and they were arranged across the very wide hallway from each other with a checkpoint arranged so that it could defend from all directions.

He could hear gunfire and shouted orders in the distance, so it was clear that the approximately seven checkpoints had at least some guards. He hoped they were too busy to notice him until it was too late.

He managed to slowly limp along the wall marked with the odd numbered containment units, refusing to give up, until he reached Quarantine 7. Ahead he saw the several the guards in their standard heavy armor, and two in bulky three meter tall suits of power armor, each arm bearing a heavy weapon.

They were all looking warily in his general direction, though they apparently hadn't seen him yet.

Subject One quietly cursed.

Then he realized that Subject Zero was actually back in the direction he'd come from.

He bit back a much louder curse and turned around.

After far too long, he made it back through the gloom to Quarantine 05, where the scientists had said they kept Subject Zero sedated. He sincerely hoped that they hadn't seen fit to move her somewhere else yet though he did remember hearing from that same conversation that they had been building a new Quarantine chamber for her specifically.

"If they've already moved her…"

He set to work again, slowly prying the much thicker doors up and open before jamming them in place. It took entirely too long and all of the psionic effort left him lightheaded. Or maybe that was the definitely-infect wounds. Or Both.

He stumbled into the chamber and through the barely-lit rooms until he reached a wide open space with a large block of metal in the middle.

That was the coffin, as he called it. While it was hard to tell in the emergency lighting, it looked like a giant metal box with a great many tubes and devices attached to it. Someone versed in antique technology might have likened it to an automobile engine, but Subject One had no such knowledge.

He extended his wavering sense and felt the muffled rage and suffering of a powerful psychic.

He was in the right place, or at least someone was in there.

Now he needed to open it up.

Which could be a problem.

He heard another muffled explosion echoing form behind. He needed to open in [i]now[/i].

But in his state he could barely distinguish the various mechanisms from each other, and he was hopeless with the circuitry. He didn't have the time to disassemble it. "What do I do?"

Then he saw a lever labeled:

EMERGENCY RELEASE

WARNING: DO NOT USE EXCEPT IN A CODE BLACK

"Convenient."

Subject One limped over and pulled the lever, causing the machine to rumble and a nearby panel to unfold so that a glass tube could move out and be set so that it and its occupant were suspended vertically with tubes and mechanical arms connecting them both back to the coffin.

Within was Subject Zero, hooked up to several catheters, not that Subject One knew that particular word, and a breath mask, even though the fluid that filled the tube was technically breathable. Likely it was another way to send in sedatives. She had long dark hair, pale skin from lack of sunlight light him, and was otherwise what he'd expect from an eight-year-old.

Subject One looked at the tube and the unconscious, though somehow still angry, Subject Zero for a moment, before using his pipe to smash open the tube, spilling fluid and occupant onto the floor.

He crouched over her, hissing in pain from his thighs. "Listen, I know some part of you is awake and that you're angry at Armacham. So am I, but neither of us have any chance of escaping on our own. We can work together. We help each other, and we both get out, or at least you do, so we give those bastards in their high-rises hell for sticking us in here. What do you say?"

He waited for an uncomfortably long moment before he felt acquiescence from the unconscious psion.

"Good, I'll carry you out to the checkpoint. I forgot to look for medigel and I have some pretty nasty cuts that are definitely infected, and I'd rather not die." When he again felt acceptance directed towards him, he pulled her up and set her so they she lay over his shoulder.

He stood and limped slowly towards the exit from Quarantine 05.

"You know, it's kind of freaky that you're aware even when they've knocked you out."

…

"Not that it's bad, I think it's good, but you will be able to kill them for us right? I'm not in too good shape from getting here."

…

"Perfect."

As he neared the door he heard footsteps approaching from both directions.

Armacham guards.

Then he heard heavy thuds in the middle distance.

Armacham guards and mechs.

"It just keeps getting better," Subject One muttered quietly to himself.

He felt Subject Zero emit annoyance.

"I'm not blaming you, it's just that every choice was terrible and this was a longshot anyway," He whispered.

He stood still for a moment.

"I doubt I'll live to escape now…" He sighed. "…but you're strong enough to be aware even when they've put you under. And you're only, what eight?"

Several footsteps approached. He wanted to fight, to go down screaming and swinging, but he was barely standing with the pain and the lightheadedness, so he decided to set Subject Zero down. Instead he fell to his knees and barely kept her from hitting the floor.

"You've got a life ahead of you, a shitty one, but its there, and you'll get stronger too, with or without their amplification experiments. I remember how my powers, weak as they are, got stronger too. Helped me steal this nice collection. You should read Dickens sometime. Didn't think much of it myself, but its literature, so you might like it. I bet Mike burned them by now, that asshole."

He carefully set her on the ground as she began to stir, but he found it hard to pay attention to that with the way the world was swaying.

"But anyway, you'll get stronger and eventually the drugs won't stop you, and their boxes won't stop you neither, okay?"

He could see the shapes of guards standing by either side of the doorway, probably aiming guns at him.

He looked down at the floor and grabbed his pipe and struggled to stand as the guards shouted at him.

"When you break out of here and make the Armacham execs choke on their own livers, tell them Jack Shepard sends his regards."

Then the guards opened fire.

"In other news the Church of Unitology has built yet another temple on the Citadel as more and more become disillusioned with the Citadel Council's failure of vision. They say that the new temple, which is located in Bakera Ward, will be completed within the month.

"This has been the Omega Update, giving you the news you need, and now a thanks to our sponsors:"

"Umbrella: Keeping you safe and helping you out when the galaxy won't."


	2. Chapter 2: Best Friends Forever

Chapter 2: Best Friends Forever

The guards standing in the doorway aimed their weapons at the test subject that they weren't under orders to keep alive. Killing him made it simpler, especially given the person lying next to Subject One, Jack Shepard.

Subject Zero.

She however, didn't want them to kill Jack. He had freed her, he had helped her. And just like Dr. Franken, he hadn't been scared of her when he carried her out. It was like he knew she wouldn't kill him. Which wasn't guaranteed.

She didn't want him to die. He had helped her, and didn't hate her or fear her. Dr. Franken was like that and he was her friend, so that made Jack her friend too.

And Subject Zero did not like it when her last friend died.

Sure she could summon Dr. Franken anytime she concentrated, or was made enough, but she couldn't talk with him, or have him tell her his stories of galactic legends like the Krogan Who Wouldn't Die. When he became a ghost, all he started to care about was making more people ghosts, and while she could certainly agree with the sentiment, she missed the company.

It wasn't even a dilemma really.

The guards opened fire into the air as they were thrown into the others around the corner hard enough to break through the kinetic barriers and crack the armor within.

Not only was she going to kill all them like her first friend Dr. Franken wanted, but she'd keep her new friend alive so he'd always keep her company. She liked the thought.

She stood up as she considered how best to do this. She needed to keep him help him he was bleeding and he had said he needed medigel, but she didn't know anything about medigel or how to use it. Not really. She could of course always just get the knowledge of what he meant and needed from his mind, since he knew more than her, but people died when she did that and killing him wouldn't work at all.

She focused on the guards and grew angry. Not only did they want to lock her back up and put her to sleep, but they also wanted to kill [i]_her_[/i] friend. She wanted them dead, her rage rushing outwards and shades solidifying from the eddies of her hate. They would help her make that happen. But before all of the nearby (and far away) guards could die, she decided to look in as many of their minds as possible to find out what she could about medigel and fixing people who were hurt.

She started with the calmest, a man inside a combat mech which was nearly four times her size and who exuded authority. She reached into his mind and started looking around, before her concentration was broken by rockets hitting the ground near the doorway, sending her and Jack flying backwards.

She felt his mind start to fade, like it did before people became ghosts.

She was scared, she didn't want him to be like Dr. Franken, she wanted him to stay with her forever, so she did what she had done the other times she had been scared like this and [i]_pulled_[/i] the voices closer. They were from the dark place beyond the light, and they always gave her advice when she was upset. They told her how to become stronger, how to make the ghosts always stay just within reach. How to take the power of psychics and others that died and become better, stronger, more. The first time they came to her was when the doctors first took her to the labs, to the altar. The voices told her how she could make the doctors stop hurting her, and when she listened, they did stop though different doctors hurt her again later.

"I need to find out what to do," she whispered.

[i]/_"Take their thoughts, drink them, eat them. Don't stop at just one."/_[/i]

"How do I fix him?"

[i]/_"Bring him to the altar it will save him, make him stronger. Even in death."/_[/i]

She frowned. Dr. Franken had told her not to trust the voices, that they lied… but they were helpful. Except this time, anyway.

No, she didn't want him to die, even for a moment, even if the voices could bring him back. She stood up and sent her mind out to the man in the armor. When she saw he was a ghost now too, she picked the nearest guard. Upon seeing it has just a replica, she took out how to use its gun and the Replica's head exploded inside its helmet.

She'd already taken how to use all of the Arrmacham guns, and even the various power armors and mechs, but there wasn't much else to take from the Replica.

She then found another power armored guard. This one was scared and was retreating from the shades and from her. But he hadn't retreated far enough. It turned out that he knew quite a bit about field medicine, as he called it, and Subject Zero was pleased that she found what she wanted.

With no further need of the guards, she focused on her power, sending it outwards to cover more in ever greater strength. Dozens of shades and other entities started manifesting all throughout Quarantine, and all of them were driven outwards and upwards by the currents of her power, and presence of fresh food. The surviving two mech pilots did not last long, even in their mechanized battlesuits as Subject Zero quickly threw the first into the ceiling 30 meters up with both the throw and the fall back to the floor damaging the small mech, and then knocked over the other power armor before taking the technical knowledge from that pilot.

She focused on the walls of the corridor leading back to the machine she had been kept in. She was looking for water to rinse off Jack's wounds, but it was hard to tell through the metal and with the distractions all around her. So she ripped off the wall panels to check the pipes with her eyes. It was difficult with the poor lighting, but she saw the label that had been put there for maintenance.

Unfortunately, the thick pipe had little water in it due to some blockage or leak. Or at least that's what the knowledge she'd taken from some Maintenance staff several months ago told her. At the time Dr. Franken had told her that killing people just to sate her curiosity was bad, but she didn't think he'd mind now. He had become much more permissive (a word she'd picked up from an annoying researcher) after becoming a ghost.

She pulled the pipe out so it hanging into the corridor dripping water, exerting more effort than she had to throw a light mech. She had to be careful, gentle even, and that was very hard for her to do with her powers. She wasn't very good at moving liquids through the air either. She was better at pushing things actually. Then she realized the solution and moved Jack through the air so that he was floating underneath the opening of the pipe, careful not to hurt him.

Both that precision and the earlier precision with the pipe were as taxing as projecting her power across the entirety of Quarantine was. She briefly considered whether it was worth the effort. Then she reached far back into the pipe and started pushing all of the water in the pipe out.

The trickle quickly transitioned into a stream, and then a thick wave which knocked Jack back, drenching him. It would have to do.

Subject Zero then walked over to the nearby checkpoint, carrying Jack with her despite the strain of the required focus. On her way over she saw a guard holding off the shades and ghosts with a shotgun in one hand and an LMG in the other. The guard, who Alma could tell was a she, was doing quite well. This annoyed Subject Zero since the guard could shoot Jack, or even her, while she was using the medigel. That wouldn't do.

She resorted to the simple solution: setting Jack down for a moment to pick up the guard, causing her to cry out in pain at the psychic vise enclosing her, and throw her with all the force Subject Zero could muster. The guard arced into the distance of the Quarantine hall and did not land for several seconds.

Subject Zero then took Jack to the medical supplies box and used the disinfectant and medigel as her acquired memories indicated. It took several minutes, in which she realized that Jack smelled of sewage and other chemicals, and that his clothes were stained with it. She hadn't realized earlier because she had at first been recovering from the induced coma (which her psychic power had enabled her mind to resist to a degree), and then the smell of blood and offal from the dying and dead guards had masked the stench.

She decided she liked the smell less than she did from the dead bodies. At least with those there was the associated satisfaction of revenge.

Jack groaned and sat against one of the barriers around the checkpoint. "Thanks."

Subject Zero nodded and said, "You're welcome, Jack."

"That's good." He paused for a moment. "Hey, I never got your name. They always called you 'Subject Zero.'"

She frowned. "Only Dr. Franken ever used it, but it is Alma Wade."

"Well, it's nice to finally meet you Alma," Jack said as he held out his hand to her.

She looked at it for a moment, trying to gauge from his emotion what she was supposed to do. No one had ever done this with her before. Sensing growing discomfort and uncertainty from her friend, she also held out her hand and said, "It is nice to meet you too, Jack."

She felt his confusion grow for a moment before it gave way to sadness of some sort and humor. She didn't understand, but Dr. Franken had felt sad in the same way several times before he became a ghost.

He sighed. "It's called a handshake," and he took her hand and moved it up and then down twice. While he was doing this, Alma had to resist the urge to take something from his mind. After all, he didn't have any intent to harm her, and wasn't like the researchers. He released her hand and then held out a gas mask like the one he wore towards her. "They're probably gassing the place, so you should probably wear this even if your powers can work around it. It'll help us last longer."

She looked at the mask for a moment before nodding and taking the mask. "Okay."

She already knew how to put on the masks from taking the knowledge earlier, so in moments the two stood in the checkpoint ready to proceed.

Jack looked at an intact mech lying on the floor nearby. It's squat, boxy shape containing two small missile launchers, two machine guns, and two high powered laser cannons. Next to the cockpit door on the front was a logo of a five-pointed star with a stylized AB over it. Jack didn't really know that much about mech other than that they were cool and he had always wanted one. He first learned of them when he was nine and saw an image of a Krogan Avatar mech from the Rachni war. That was the moment he knew he would get one, someday.

He pointed at the mech. "I don't know what kind that is, but I want it."

"That's an Archernar power armor, it is more heavily armed but structurally weaker than the EPA, like the one over there," Alma pointed at another bipedal mech lying on its back with blood seeping out of its cockpit. "Also it doesn't have autorepair functionality built into it and lacks the EPA's onboard microfabricator."

"How do you know that?" Jack asked, turning to her.

"I took it from several pilots," she replied, not really understanding how he [i]_didn't_[/i] do the same thing since he clearly wanted powered armor, or as the bigger ones were often called: mechs.

She now sensed concern and fear. "Oh. Okay." After a moment the fear mostly dissipated as he looked thoughtfully at the EPA. "So you're saying I should take the one leaking blood?"

"It also has psychic shielding which should have repaired by now. I broke it earlier."

"And it repairs itself? Sweet. I'm definitely taking it." He ran over and Alma followed.

Once there he looked at the armor. "How do I open it?"

"You press the open button that's inside, but first you have to break the shielding because the armor interferes otherwise."

Jack concentrated for a moment. "I think I can see inside to press it actually. There are quite a few buttons…"

Alma frowned. The armor made it too fuzzy for her to use her powers without breaking the armor first, why did he get to do it when he was weaker than her? "It's the one with one next to the door near his right foot."

"Okay thanks." The cockpit hissed open and Jack looked inside. "I think I'm going to need to clean this off… Not much, since I'm already filthy, but at least clear out the brains and body parts."

Alma nodded.

Jack looked at her, and she felt annoyance from him. "Would you mind helping?"

She thought for a moment. "No."

Jack waited another moment. "Will you?"

"How?"

Jack sighed. "By taking out the body parts and bringing out the medical supplies so I can clean up the worst of it."

She nodded before a thought occurred to her. "If you don't want to wear that, you might find something in the labs, and we need to stop by there anyway."

"Sure, but I'm going to blow it to pieces with this mech when we get there."

Alma smiled. "That won't be a problem."

When they saw the Quarantine be completely compromised, the Armacham guards and their Replica contingent decided to hold at the top of the elevator shaft that led down into it. After all, it was a strong defensive position and with as a REV8, three EPAs and twelve REV6s their commanding officer was confident that not even Subject Zero could defeat them all. Especially when they deployed several ground and hover combat drones to supply additional firepower.

Some might have asked why the officer was doing this when he had orders to take Subject Zero alive. This was because he was not a fool. Nor did he want to die. Especially not to the soul-eating abomination that scuttlebutt said Subject Zero was.

And so he and his men (and the Replicas and the drones) had spent the last several minutes firing at any ghosts or shades or any other psychic entities that thought they could take on trained professionals. Nothing could get close enough to hurt them with all of their firepower focused on the shaft and the adjacent stairs.

That's when the lights flickered, the officer's EKG meter went nuts, and rockets started flying up the shaft, sending human guards and Replicas scattering for cover against the sudden barrage.

Someone shouted "Psychic rockets?!" incredulously, before shades, specters and fire-throwing Imps started to appear spontaneous all throughout the group.

Horrified realization set in as chaos descended on his forces. "The vents!" Unfortunately, that was the moment all of his knowledge on the tactical situation of the area was taken and his head exploded.

Jack was standing in front of another impressive mech. He didn't care that it was officially power armor, it was still awesome. "So does the REV8 also have autorepair?"

"Yes… It also has lasers, but no minigun or jump jets," answered Alma, who was sitting on top of an extremely dented REV6 power armor which was splattered with liberal amounts of blood, like everything else in the room. She had her head in her hands and her eyes closed.

"This has jump jets?!" Jack shouted incredulously, causing Alma to wince. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"…didn't ask…"

Jack paused and frowned. "Are you alright? You look like you've got a headache. Burnout?"

"…Yes."

Jack sighed. "How bad is it? There are going to be a lot more guards with mechs and we can't really afford to wait long, they'll just send in Replicas and drones until they put us down."

"They won't win."

"If you burn yourself out you will get captured like last time, I mean this mech is awesome, but it's not the only one in this place…" He hummed in thought. "Do you know how to pilot that REV8?"

Alma nodded. "Yes."

"Then pilot it, at least until you don't have a headache. That way we won't have to worry about you burning out like I almost have just opening doors."

"Okay."

After she cleared out the cockpit of the REV8 and unlocked it (Jack assumed she took the information from the pilot's head), Alma settled into the pilot's compartment of the large power armor and activated it. As the power armor came to its feet, twenty Replicas burst around the corner of the corridor leading towards the labs. They rushed to the checkpoint and into cover as the two escapees brought their powered armors to bear, Jack sending out a barrage of missiles directly behind the Replicas to hit them with the blast.

Alma's REV8 was much slower due to it fact that as an eight year old girl, she had trouble reaching the controls. However, she managed to fire a salvo of rockets which destroyed one of the checkpoint's barricades and sent several Replicas flying. Seeing the destruction brought a smile to her face.

Then a red, white and black colored Replica with a LMG stood up in the open and began spraying fire at her to no noticeable effect. Alma felt a small smirk of anticipation, she could feel the thrill of blowing things up with mechs. She fired, sending out a barrage of laser blasts, only to see them all miss the Replica. She growled in frustration and tried to readjust her aim, straining her arms forward in order to more accurately use the joystick. It didn't work.

The two were locked in a stalemate because Alma couldn't get the unit to actually hit the Replica with either the lasers or the rockets while it stood in the open determinedly firing at Alma as intense ultraviolet lasers and rockets flew past it.

At that point it was the only Replica left, all of the others having been killed by Jack in his EPA, which he now used to watch the duel. He couldn't help but laugh at the situation, the most powerful and dangerous psychic on the planet, scary enough to warrant being put into a coma in Quarantine and who was now armed with a powerful mech, couldn't kill a single Replica soldier. Cackling, he sat back and started looking for the jump jet button.

In frustration, Alma tried to reach out and crush the Replica, only to realize that the psionic shielding of the RE8 Leviathan was strong enough to effectively blind her abilities outside the unit, and she couldn't open it without risking getting shot by the Replica.

After several seconds, the Replica stopped firing and retreated, heading towards the corner it had only recently come around so that it would have cover until its weapon cooled down. As it retreated, it switched to an SMG and continued to fire on Alma's suit.

Growling, Alma sent the REV8 stomping forward after the Replica, sending out another barrage of rockets, the jerking of it all nearly sending her out of her seat and forcing her to stop.

The Replica made it around the corner before throwing a frag grenade at the REV8 as a parting gift. The blast barely affected the shields, but did knock Alma around so that she hit her head.

Feeling the pain blossoming from her forehead, she touched her left hand to where the pain was centered and felt wetness. She was bleeding. The Replica had hurt her, and she and been able to do nothing to it.

She roared in fury, her anger spilling through the armor and out to fill the nearby hallways. She sent her unit after the Replica at full speed, crashing into the corner but recovering as LMG fire started to hit the armor's kinetic barriers. Alma grit her teeth and laboriously turned to face her enemy, who was walking backwards away from her while keeping up a steady stream of fire. She sent the REV8 charging down the hallway at its full speed, which was about twice a human's sprinting speed. The powered armor unit bounced off of the walls of the corridor as it ran and seeing its rapid approach, the Replica turned and ran as well.

Alma grinned as her mech bore down on the Replica, only to howl in fury again as it leapt out of the way around the corner towards the Research Labs and Alma collided with the corner on the other side of the T intersection.

Taking a moment to shake her head clear and wait for the electronics to repair from her accidental psionic damage to them, she had the mech take two steps back so that it could head into Research Labs without running the risk of hitting the walls again.

Then she took aim at the bloody gurney that the Replica had taken cover behind. She fired with both lasers and rockets at once this time, and it worked! The Replica was sent flying into and through a glass wall. Alma crowed in triumph. Maybe using the armor wouldn't be so bad.

The Replica Elite picked itself up from the explosion and looked around at the office it had been thrown into. Seeing a small medigel canister and registering its injured condition, Replica Tango 12609 limped over and slotted the medigel into its medical port, which feed medigel to the areas of the body where it was needed.

Hearing the thuds of the approaching commandeered powered armor units, the Replica moved through a nearby doorway that led away from the main hallway that the hostiles were using. As they passed, the Replica considered what to do. Its psionic commander was out of reach due to interference, and it had received no retreat order through its comm. implants. This meant it was still under orders to neutralize all hostiles and secure Target: Subject Zero.

Both hostiles were inside powered armor units, and Target: Subject Zero was not designated as piloting or likely to attempt piloting one.

It relayed its tactical information to platoon command and requested assistance due to overhelming enemy firepower, then began to follow the two hostiles. It would engage them, as per orders until those orders changed or it accomplished its objective.

"WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO KILL YOU!" Alma screamed in frustration as she sent another salvo of rockets into the adjacent lab, blowing yet a hole in the wall and sending a cloud of dust into the air. Alma switched to thermal imaging in time to see the Replica move past the hole she had just opened. This time her scream forced the REV8 into shutdown for emergency repairs.

She heard several more explosions as Jack send missiles after the elusive Replica soldier. Then she heard a muffled voice, "This it just ridiculous, now I can't hit him either. Whatever, it's not like he can hurt us anyway. Let's just keep going as soon as your armor is finished repairing."

Alma scowled and hit the eject button. "I want it to die," she stated as she stepped out of the now open mech and pulled up a piece of the floor to protect her from gunfire. Not that there was any. She reached out with her mind as her power flowed outwards through the labs. She quickly found the Replica around a corner running down a hallway away from her, and threw it forward through a glass wall, sending it landing in from of the altar itself. Satisfied, Alma turned to Jack in his EPA and said, "What we need to get too is that way," and she pointed towards the altar and the Replica.

Once the REV8 had finished its repair and reboot, the two made their way to the altar. It was long and thin, as though shaped for something inhuman to lay on top of. It looked like it was made of obsidian or some other black stone, but had sinister glowing blue and red runes covering it. Just barely incomprehensible whispers could be heard by anyone who entered the formerly sealed chamber which housed the altar. Most noteworthy to the two psychics as they stood before it, was the strong psionic emanations of power, hunger and an alien otherness.

"So you want me to lay down on this so the 'voices in the dark' can talk to me?" Jack summarized.

"They will help you become stronger."

"Right."

"You think I'm lying?"

"No, I don't think [i]_you_[/i] are lying. I just have trouble trusting sinister ancient artifacts that are hungry and whisper in my mind. I have issues like that."

"I was fine."

"Hah – Sorry, I didn't mean to offend."

"…"

"It's just that with everything I've heard about you, I would hesit-… Well, actually since you've spent at least four years in the hands of Armacham – which is what, half your life? – I can see that there might be alternate explanations for the stories I've heard about you. I mean, shit, now that I think about it, I'd probably do most of the stuff you've done in your positon."

"So you'll let them make you stronger so you can be my friend forever."

"…"

"What's wrong? You are now more uncomfortable."

Jack sighed. "There are worse friends I could have, and someone needs to look out for you I suppose."

"I can take care of myself."

"And then they arrest you for exploding someone's head because you needed directions."

"I'd kill them too then."

"And that's why I need to stick with you, because I'd prefer there to be people left alive at the end of the day."

"Why?"

"You know what, sure. Dark voices, do your worst." And with that Jack lay down on the altar, his right hand next to where the head of the Replica soldier was propped against the altar.

The blue and red runes flared in intensity and the whispering increased in intensity.

[i]/_"She has brought you too Our altar."/_[/i]

The discordant yet harmonious voices seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was impossible for Jack to determine their number or nature, save that there were many and they now had access to his mind.

"So what do you chumps call yourselves?"

[i]/_"We are Those Who Simply Are, and you have been deemed worthy of Our boon."/_[/i]

"And what's that mean?"

[i]/_"You will be allowed to walk Our Path, towards Ascension. This is your first step."/_[/i]

"Talking with you? Because honestly, I'd prefer to be leaving here before Armacham tries to kill us again."

[i]/_"Few are deemed worthy of the Path at once, for one already on it to call for another worthy is even rarer. We will help you as we have helped all who have sought to become as Us."/_[/i]

Jack frowned. "Even if they aren't worthy?"

[i]/_"All are helped in their own way."/_[/i]

Before he could ask another question, a shrill alarm started to sound.

[i]/_"They thought like many in the past that their cunning could manipulate Us, use Us, outsmart Us. Like all others, they know fear when they learn they are wrong."/_[/i]

"What's going on?" Jack demanded as he sat up, the glow of the runes fading .

[i]/_"They saw you commune with Us and have realized their error in allowing this."/_[/i]

"Code Dawn," Alma said.

"What?" Jack asked.

"They're going to flood the halls with plasma and use a gamma bomb to sterilize the facility, we need to leave immediately," Alma explained as she turned and looked towards the shortest path to the exit.

"Right, I think we'll need our mechs to force our way through the Replicas and drones they'll throw in our way," Jack said as he ran to the EPA.

"I won't have to shot, will I?" Alma asked.

Jack laughed as he hopped in the EPA. "Just run them over! Though I've gotta wonder what's making them do this."

Then they were both in their mechs and racing towards the Security Complex and their only hope of survival.

The Replica Elite stood up and picked up its LMG before jogging after them.

Saren Arterius, Citadel Spectre and Majority Stakeholder of ExoGenni, as well as several other companies, sat in his lounge chair reading the news. His private cruiser was designed, unlike most other Turian ships, to be both comfortable and functional. His personal and quest quarters and areas had luxurious seating with tables made of exotic materials and numerous holographic projectors of the highest quality for maximum convenience and comfort. Of course, every chair, couch, table and projector also had hidden weapons compartments keyed to him, but that was also what he considered luxury. After all, it was unlikely he'd need all of those weapons at any given time.

Outside of those public and person areas were where any military engineer would look and drool. He was a wealthy private individual with a very dangerous job, and since he was expected to pay for most of his own expenses one way or another he had need his own ship for dangerous missions outside the reach of the Hierarchy. That led to this ship. He wanted the best cruiser in the galaxy, and he got as close to it as he possibly could. Cutting edge energy weapons, such as a Salarian plasma cannon system based in part upon technological innovations from human companies such as Armacham with its efficient laser weaponry.

It was a ship that could match and probably best just about any other cruiser in the galaxy in a fair fight, and Saren made it a policy never to fight fair.

He picked up a glass of Idari Brandy. Like the ship and everything in it, it was expensive and worth it.

He switched to a Specter bulletin as he took a sip.

"HIGH PRIORITY ALERT: All agents, stolen Prothean artifact confirmed on Omega for auction by STG."

Saren grinned. Of all of the things he spent his money on, his weapons and armor were his favorite expense.

The human ambassador said he was a loose cannon who didn't play by the rules?

Well, he was about to go visit Aria and break one.

He chuckled and took another sip.


	3. Chapter 3: Escape Part 1

Chapter 3: Escape Part 1

After the alarm went off, all the resistance that the two encountered were left behind Replicas and combat drones, in addition to the few functional ceiling turrets in the inner facility. Alma in particular enjoyed bullrushing through clusters of withdrawing Replicas, even with the nervousness from the steadily progressing countdown.

Then they reached the doors to Security, which was the only connection between where the test subjects were kept and everything else, including the only way off the planet, the spaceport. Jack didn't know much about the planet, but he'd heard enough to hear that it was uninhabited except for the Armacham facility and that it was in some distant part of the Terminus, the roughly half of the known galaxy that had no major states and which generally considered the lawless playground of pirates and warlords.

No matter what, it was definitely better than dying to a gamma bomb, so Jack focused on the task at hand.

The doors themselves had been torn open by the former test subjects whose bodies now littered the hallways after they were killed by the guards. Luckily for Alma and Jack the holes were big enough to fit the mechs through, which made sense since they had to have been taken to Quarantine somehow.

Voices were loud over the radio as the Armacham personnel panicked and tried to evacuate, but Jack immediately recognized one. "Follow me to the hangar!" Alma said over the radio.

"Okay! Wait, how do I turn the radio on? Alma? Hey, wait up!"

Alma's REV8 smashed through a hastily erected barricade of several crates and kinetic barrier generators and opened fire on something he couldn't see from behind. However, he did see the return fire bouncing off the mech's barriers and impacting on the walls around it as the mech continued to charge forward, so he assumed it was either soon to be dead Replicas, or soon to be destroyed drones. It didn't really matter which and as the two escapees continued on he simply ignored the weapons fire that bounced off his mech's barriers. He assumed that there had to be at least a few Armacham minions around somewhere since it was doubtful that they could have kept ahead of the mechs so long. He assumed that they had run into side corridors or something to avoid the captured mechs as they tried to escape. At least it made things simpler.

Alma's REV8 came to an abrupt stop, and Jack jerked back on the throttle, but not fast enough to prevent his EPA from colliding with the other mech, staggering both for a moment. When they recovered, he saw her mech's canopy open so that she could get out, and he followed suit.

Once they were out he could see what the matter was, though he assumed there was some function in the EPA that would allow him to see around obstacles without getting out. He'd seen Alma shoot walls one time in the labs, though that could have just been her terrible aim. He personally thought it would be a waste if some smoke or fog or something could stop a murdermachine like the EPA from killing people.

He shook his head clear and looked at what blocked their path: a collapsed ceiling.

"Can we clear this?" he asked.

Alma stood before the wreckage, clearly concentrating for several painfully long seconds. "Yes, one moment."

He nodded and prepared to dodge in case more of the ceiling collapsed.

After several tense seconds, there was a deafening tearing sound as the wreckage was sent crashing down the hallway and pulling more of the ceiling and walls with it. The sound was enough that Jack had to cover his ears, but eventually the ringing in his ears died down and he found that despite his worst fears, there was in fact a clear space for them to advance along the hallway. Or, rather the ceiling ahead had completely collapsed and now there was a ramp of rubble leading up to the next floor. Which was surprisingly lucky considering how much structural damage that must have caused.

The universe must have agreed because he suddenly heard an ominous groaning coming from all around him. He looked to Alma again and shouted, "We need to go now!"

She nodded and shouted back, "Security only has one two more floors before we get to the first hangar!"

They climbed back into their mechs and started up the rubble. It was slow going due to the unsteady footing, but the mehcs were able to efficiently balance themselves well enough to prevent any disastrous accidents.

This floor was both more occupied, and more chaotic. Now that he thought about it as he thundered down the maze of hallways, the first floor had been mostly unoccupied as a recently evacuated battleground. This floor however hadn't seen much in the way of fighting since there was a notable absence of blood or bullet holes after the two left behind the wreckage. However, this was clearly where most of the fleeing personnel from who had come after them had made it too, as evidenced by the large numbers of security guards running either away towards the exits, or towards cover as the former prisoners continued on their path to freedom.

Jack made it a point to shoot the guards whenever he had the chance, and sent more than one missile into offices as he passed.

He knew that if they made a concerted effort, the guards could keep Alma and him from reaching a ship in time, but it was clear that they valued their lives more than their duty to the Armacham Conglomerate. This meant that they weren't providing organized resistance, aside from the occasional squad of Replicas and drones, or the annoy turrets that seemed to be placed over every one of the larger intersections, but they weren't heavily armed enough to really pose a threat. Additionally, where the turrets made themselves known, Alma would pause and demonstrate that the REV8's rockets did not need pinpoint accuracy to be effective.

On the other hand, the ones with rockets and flamethrowers did pose problems, but they were rare, probably because Armacham didn't think it was too likely for their mechs to be stolen be the psychic kids they kept locked up and forced to fight. Suckers.

He stomped past another intersection where several Replicas and two hover drones had set up. A sweep with his miniguns and a volley of his missiles had destroyed the turret and either killed them or forced them into cover, which for his purposes was good enough. He didn't want to take any more time than absolutely necessary, and even the slightest pause to fight meant that Alma and her REV8 were farther ahead. He didn't want to get left behind.

He saw her stop at the next intersection and turn to the left as a rocket hit her mech from the corridor to the right, quickly followed by kinetic fire and a laser beam. He hadn't seen any of the Replicas use one of those so far, but he knew that Armacham did occasionally have special units equipped with them. He wasn't sure why more didn't use them, but it wasn't really important at the moment. Getting off the planet alive was.

He reached the corner after Alma had completely passed from view, and followed her, ignoring the alert for incoming fire, and the one for hull damage as well. It could fix itself later.

Then he was shaken in his seat by a rocket impact. The interface showed the kinetic barriers were almost down. But as long as it could walk faster than he could run, it didn't matter. He kept going, following Alma's mech down the corridor and into a larger cubical farm as the barriers steadily dropped.

Then he saw the barriers of the REV8 flicker and die under a barrage of missiles and grenades coming from cubicles to either side as Replicas and drones burst out of cover. He gritted his teeth as her mech came to a stop.

"No, no, no!"

The mech fired rockets to the right and swept the area with its laser cannons, setting the entire area ablaze. Jack sent missiles and a storm of slugs into the left flank and the incoming fire stopped.

Alma started moving again, but this time her mech had a noticeable limp.

Jack frowned. They [i]_needed_[/i] to get out now. The Replicas were doing their job as disposable soldiers and slowing the two down. How long had it already been? Jack wasn't sure, other than that it was too long. How much time did they have left? Too little.

And there was nothing he could do at this point since of the two, only Alma actually had any idea of the layout of the place.

He didn't like it, but he kept following her as the evacuation continued.

Replica Tango 12609 reached the entrance to the main Security servers. It was guarded by two standard Replicas and a ceiling turret.

The Replica Elite walked past the guards and the door to the servers opened automatically, even though it should have been locked.

The Replica marched through the server room, past the two towers which ran the base and approached the terminal.

It didn't have the biometrics or the ID chip to access the terminal, but it did have its Replica Cybernetic Command Chip, which allowed it to wirelessly communicate with its superiors and with other Replicas. However, the wireless signal could be used to communicate with other things.

The Replica Elite didn't know any of this though. All it knew were its orders.

Alma and Jack had parked the their mechs in front of the closed elevator doors.

"Are you sure we can't just use the stairs?"

Alma concentrated and frowned. "They are full of scared people."

Jack sighed. "Okay, then I guess we need to get this door open and climb up the shaft. Stupid lockdown. You'd think they'd make it easy for their own people to get out if they're going to kill everything in the facility."

"Then we'd get out easily too."

"And you don't like that part?" Jack asked as he psionically started probing the structure of the doorway for ways to lever it open.

"I appreciate it." She focused on the doors, and they opened with a ping.

"Neat trick, how'd you do that? Enter some code?"

"I didn't. Someone has hacked into the system."

Jack wanted to think this over, but… "I'd rather not have to enter a hacked elevator in a base about to blow up, but I think I'll take my chances."

Alma nodded and they two entered their mechs and walked them into the waiting elevator. Then Alma and Jack opened their mechs to get out, but the elevator doors closed and it started to move up. The destination listed on the overhead display was "Hangar 02."

"Convenient."

Jack saw Alma tilt her head to the side for a moment before speaking. "They helped us."

"The evil voices that helped you learn how to eat minds?"

"Yes."

"I guess they didn't want to waste their creepy investment. Wonder how they did this though. Whatever, we're about to reach the hangar, get ready!"

They both re-entered their mechs as the elevator doors opened onto more chaos as people fled for their lives. About fifty meter in front of them across a space littered with crates and crowded with panicked employees was a freighter. Jack remembered seeing it's type often near the port before he was taken, and that it was a Kowloon freighter. Mass produced and easy to operate. Excellent for two escapees with limited piloting experience.

They rushed towards it, Alma opening fire once and hitting a crate. There was a guard near the crate, so Jack assumed she was trying hit him.

When the guards saw what they were doing, they ran for cover or just stood out in the open and fired at the two mechs, desperate to stop them from reaching the freighter.

Jack ignored the gunfire, he'd let them live and escape on their own, it didn't matter at the moment as long as he got away into FTL before the gamma bomb went off. He didn't know much about weapons really, but he did know that Batarians had used a gamma bomb to wipe out an entire Krogan colony once so they could settle there. People hadn't been happy about that.

And then the EPA shook as a missile hit it, causing his kinetic barriers to drop precipitously. Looking around as he continued forward, he saw several turrets had dropped out of the ceiling, several of them clearly armed with missile launchers. All of them firing at him.

Jack cursed as his and Alma's barriers rapidly dropped under the barrage and the mechs themselves began taking direct fire. They couldn't survive much longer.

Replica Tango 12609 turned and left the server room. Its objective was complete and it had new orders.

So did the other Replicas.

Urdnot Wrex stood in the hallway to leading into the morgue. He'd taken this job so because the humans were paying well because it seemed like a good chance to relax and catch up with some old friends who the humans had also hired. Not that he was exactly good at relaxing, being a Krogan and all, but he'd learned that it was important from time to time. Add to that the fact that it was perhaps his first chance in a long time to fulfill the 'master' part of Battle Master, and that this could be his opportunity to start a Krogan run mercenary/security company that wasn't run by a bunch of bloodthirsty varren-brains, and he had thought that this was a good job to take.

And now people were crazy, killing themselves and each other before becoming homicidal undead abominations.

He fired his incendiary loaded shotgun at another necromorph that tried to ambush him from the vents. He smirked as the chunks of its body burned.

Not what he'd hoped for, but it was still fun. And since the surviving Krogan and humans were looking to him for leadership after his counter-coup for control of the Ishimura, he had plenty of potential recruits for his future company.

He laughed as several necromorphs chased one of the human security officers around the corner and into his sights. After so long, things were looking up.


	4. Chapter 4: Escape Part 2

Chapter 4: Escape Part 2

"Come on evil voices, you hacked the elevator, hack the turrets!" Jack cried out.

As if they had been waiting for him to ask, the turrets all suddenly shifted targets from the two escapees to the guards and researchers.

"You were waiting for me to say that weren't you?" Jack asked. He cursed.

The only response was the now present thumps of missile detonations.

"Well, at least we can leave now," Jack said as he started towards the freighter, only to see it lifting off.

He cursed again.

Then he saw Alma open up her mech and get out. She stood next to it and staring at the freighter with was over ten meters in the air by that time and was starting to accelerate way.

He aimed at the freighter and fired everything he could at it. [i]_He needed that ship!_[/i] And if he couldn't have it to get off the planet, then no one else would.

Alma clearly agreed, because the ship suddenly crashed into the floor of the hangar, as though something had swatted it down. With a deafening, continuous crash, it plowed through equipment and people before colliding with another freighter which had been, and still mostly was, obscured from Jack's vision.

"I hope the other ship still works," Jack commented. Then he saw that Alma had collapsed to the ground. "Dammit, she burned out!" He hit the open button and jumped out of the EPA as soon as he had a chance.

Running over, he saw her still breathing, so he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder and leapt behind a nearby crate so that they wouldn't be as likely to get shot.

Taking a moment, he looked Alma over. It looked like her collapse had split her skin, but he didn't think it was anything major, and he could feel her psychic presence this close but it seemed less intense, likely due to burnout. She'd probably be fine after some rest.

"I guess I'll just have to wait an – oh wait, I'm going to die, thanks earsplitting sirens, I would have forgotten otherwise," Jack said as he looked back up at the two mechs. He seriously doubted he had time to take both mechs to whatever ship could carry the two off planet, so it came down to which did he want to take with him, at least to the ship? He wasn't going to go out there without some protection if he could help it and he was pretty sure that they could both fit, if uncomfortably, in one of the cockpits.

A rocket exploded nearby and he realized that this was a really stupid decision to waste time on. He hefted Alma over his shoulder and dashed to the closest mech, the REV8. Slipping inside, he managed to position her on his lap in such a way that she didn't get caught in the closing canopy, though she did make it awkward for him to steer. "Now for the ship."

He steered the REV8 forward, but due to Alma being in the way he couldn't see clearly and the mech ended up walking through a wall of containers large enough to store bodies in. "I guess you don't have to steer this thing either."

Eventually he managed to round the crashed freighter to find the cargo door for the other freighter open with several guards and other armed personnel in cover around it exchanging fire with a small REV6 powered armor equipped with lasers. Jack didn't consider it a mech because it was both not big enough and not cool enough, but that wasn't really important at the time so he sent rockets into the center of the group of Armacham goons before sweeping the area with his lasers as he stomped towards the door. The REV8 ignored the panicked fire from the guards and the REV6 seemed focused on other targets for some reason.

Jack wasn't really sure what was going on at this point, but he assumed it was something else the voices did. Which was somewhat worrying on its own, but with everything else going on he was hoping they'd keep doing whatever it was they were exactly. He take all the help he could get at the moment.

In several long seconds Jack managed to pilot the REV8 to the cargo door to meet several outbound rockets and grenades. They brought down the shields and damaged the hull, which at this point wasn't too worrying because he quickly responded in kind, firing rockets into the guards and then using the mech's lasers to cut through a crate and hopefully hit another guard.

He proceeded into the ship, the doors closing on his mech before reopening when he was in the doorway, and proceeded to kill the few guards that didn't run further into the ship and seal the door behind them.

Jack frowned. "Well now what?"

He couldn't just sit and wait in the mech. Even if the guards couldn't hurt him in it at this point, they could still keep him trapped in it until they were ready for him. Likely at another Armacham base where the voices wouldn't be so much help. Which brought up the question of how they had helped.

If they had wanted to break Alma out, why hadn't they done so earlier? If they could use the altar to somehow hack into the base, why hadn't they done that earlier? Jack was pretty sure that if all of the turrets in the base had turned on the guards and the voices had hacked the other systems during Alma's last breakout attempt, then she would have made it to a ship.

He shook his head clear of those thoughts for the moment. He needed to clear the ship before they could prepare. That meant opening that door. Which he did pretty easily with the REV8's giant laser cannons.

Seeing that he couldn't fit the REV8 through the doorway and as time was of the essence, Jack had to leave the mech to proceed, but he took a tense moment to wait and see if the guards would try to fire through the melted door. They didn't.

That was bad. He was still a bit lightheaded from his earlier psionic strain, and he couldn't afford to burnout like Alma, so killing everyone else on the ship was out. The guards had armor and ID locked weapons, so that precluded both taking one of their weapons and melee combat. Not that he had any doubts that he could take on and entire freighter of people in hand-to-hand regardless of their armor.

He he'd need to see if the grenades were ID locked. That might work.

He opened the cockpit and carried the still unconscious Alma with him behind cover near a lasered guard.

Then there was the sound of military grade lasers firing very close and the stomp of powered armor. Jack looked back towards the cargo entrance and saw the REV6 looking in his direction. He cringed, pulled Alma closer and rolled out of the way.

The REV6 proceeded to fire at them again as it approached.

Jack managed to scramble behind the REV8 which blocked the enemy powered armor from shooting at them, but Jack and Alma were now exposed to the guards if they chose to look back into the cargo hold to see what was happening. Which they did.

Jack bit out a curse as he dodged behind another crate only to feel a sharp spike of pain blooming from his left leg. He looked down and saw that one of the guards had shot him there. This wasn't going well, though at least the REV6 was now fighting the guards. Hopefully they'd kill each other.

He looked down at the leg wound. He really wished they'd taken some medigel with them. "Well duh," he said and started looking around from his position of cover, trying to locate a nearby dead guard. They would have at least a small amount of medigel that he could use.

He eventually spotted a small emergency medical pack on the belt of a nearby guard. He focused on the pack and managed to unclip it, causing it to start to slide to the floor, but he stopped it with his mind.

He then focused on moving the medical pack to him during a particularly intense exchange of fire. Hopefully it meant no one would notice him.

Once the pack was in reach he quickly grabbed it and started applying the medigel to his wounds. It contained coagulants, so he didn't have to worry about bleeding out, but now he would have trouble doing much and he still needed to clear the ship and get it off the planet. After all, the alarms were still blaring, so whatever the voices did hadn't stopped the countdown and he had no idea how much time was left.

He needed to try to use the grenades to get to the cockpit. Hopefully that would work. He telekinetically picked up one of the grenades. With his analysis, he could feel the trigger, and they were light enough that holding it wasn't much of a strain on him. Good. Especially with Alma still down for the count.

He had a plan by the time the REV6 stomped through the doorway deeper into the ship. Once it was out of the cargo hold, he took off the lab coat he was wearing and picked used it to carry as many grenades as he possibly could. He wasn't sure if the grenades were ID locked so that they would blow up if someone not authorized tried to hold them, but he didn't want to take the chance.

After spending too long limping around the cargo hold collecting grenades, he went over to the door to the outside and tapped the holographic panel next too it so that it would close. At least everyone else was too busy fighting to get to it before then.

Next he limped over to the door into the hallway. This cargo hold was one of the back rooms, of which there were several. He wasn't too clear on the layout of the ship as he'd never been in one before, but from the outside it looked like there was some sort of larger room separating the back rooms from the front few where the bridge was located.

All he had to do was clear out a ship full of guards and some psycho in powered armor with six grenades and then pilot the ship into orbit and use FTL before the gamma bomb went off.

Wonderful.

Alma drifted in a cloud of painful fuzziness, unable to clearly sense anything or do anything, and even the act of sensing psionically, which she did automatically, was painful.

Not only that, but she couldn't move her own body, everything was leaden. She could barely even think.

She drifted in the painfully disorientating yet numbing cloud for a long time, trying and failing to do anything.

She knew she had to do something, something urgent, but at the same time she couldn't summon the strength to remember what was so urgent.

This went on for what seemed like forever, until she felt a psionic jolt.

She knew what it meant. Someone had died near her, within her reach. She felt a trickle strength flow into her, clearing her mind in a wash of foreign memory and dying suffering.

She was still too weak to do anything, but she was aware of the slowly dissipating cloud within her mind.

Then another death came to her and she regained yet more strength. She could perceive the room around her vaguely. She could tell it wasn't where she was before. It was smaller. She could also hear, vaguely. There was a loud thump and another death came to her. She focused and felt the floor she lay upon.

Concentrating, she was able to move each of her limbs, but it was hard and they wouldn't hold her weight. Instead, she sent out her aura, to expand her reach so that more deaths would come to her, and so she could find Jack. He had to be there somewhere, even if she had trouble finding him in her current state.

It turned out that the REV6 pilot had not forgotten about Jack like he'd hoped. Instead, they had apparently instead decided to go into the hallway to kill the guards before turning back around. He'd had to waste half of his grenades to kill the pilot, and then been forced to go to the dangerous edge of burnout by snapping the neck of a guard that had somehow ambushed him from behind. He had probably been hiding.

Now Jack was crouched around the edge of the doorway of one of the side rooms. He had taken the all too risky gamble of actually picking up the grenades to manually toss and detonate because everything was getting fuzzy and lights were appearing in his eyes from intense overuse of his abilities, but he had definitively determined that for some reason Armacham had not seen fit to ID lock their grenades. Lucky him.

He chucked another grenade through the doorway, into the corridor and then into the main cargo bay. "How did I do that?"

Whatever answer he was hoping for didn't come, instead his reply was a burst from an assault rifle from beyond.

A moment later there was a loud boom of a grenade going off, but no screaming or anything else to indicate it had been effective.

"Damn." Jack looked away from the doorway into the main cargo hold and down at his makeshift grenade bag. He had picked up two, so he now had three left. He didn't feel lucky. Then he noticed a barely perceptible figure standing in front of him. He looked up and saw glowing red eyes.

He cried out in shock, threw the bag into the specter and lunged away. He wasn't able to make the landing though due to his numbness and the fuzziness of a near burnout. However, he was able to trip and hit his head.

Dazed and desperate, he lashed out psionically, trying to stop the thing from killing him.

Unfortunately the sudden blinding pain of overusing psionic abilities caused him to pass out before he knew if it worked.

It had been a long time by the reckoning of some, but for this being it was only a moment, a pause between the brief times of action.

It did not truly sleep; rather it became physically quiescent as its mind, its true nature, withdrew to Their home.

But the call had gone out, and They had answered, as They should. Now it was time to wake and begin Their sacred work again.

The Resplendent Sovereign of Nazara returned to the waking universe and watched the small lifeforms go about their lives as its body came online.

Throughout the galaxy, it saw the glimmering sparks of those with potential, but they were not the ones it wanted. No, in a remote section of the galaxy where the sparks and embers were few and far between, for their kind at least, It saw the one. The one it had woken for, the one that would complete the Cycle.

Nazara issued orders to Their servants and prepared to move out as lives flicker and shifted across the galaxy like candle-lit shadows across a wooden screen.

Then another joined the first on the Path. This was not uncommon, but still unexpected.

If Nazara had been capable of it, It would have smiled. As it was, Its form sent out waves of pleasure across the pond that was the galaxy.


	5. Chapter 5: Again?

Chapter 5: Again?

Everything ached. He lay on his back on a mattress, a sheet over him but he didn't have a shirt or pants. There was steady beeping to his left and several pricking sensations in his left arm. In the background he could hear the faint hum of ventilation and other life support systems. He could feel a strong psychic presence to his immediate right and a psychic background of pain, suffering and anger.

So he was in Medical.

Well, actually that didn't quite fit, since they wouldn't have let any of the other subjects sit near him in Medical, even if any of them actually wanted too. He didn't really have anyone he was close to ever since he was taken by Armacham. The bastards deliberately undermined that sort of thing, forcing people who they thought were getting too close to fight to the death, or else.

Actually, hadn't all of his acquaintances died?

And what about the gamma bomb?

Was the person sitting next to him Alma? What happened to her?

Had he died and gone to hell, except he was already there so he didn't actually go anywhere?

"My life is pain," Jack groaned.

After a brief moment, he felt a sudden psychic assault from the person sitting next to him. Honestly, it felt like the psionic equivalent of getting tackled by a krogan.

He let out a gasp of pain and seized up as he futilely struggled to fight the attack off. [i]_Definitely Medical_,[/i] passed through his mind as he tried to push back to no effect.

Suddenly the assault stopped and he went limp.

After several seconds of gasping breaths he heard it: "Yes." It was a little girl's voice, rough from lack of regular use, perhaps.

But he recognized it.

Opening his eyes to see the metal paneled ceiling and propping himself up on one arm as he turned to her, he asked incredulously, "What the hell was that for?!"

"I wanted to see if were still injured," Alma responded from the stool she sat on, looking at him with her faintly glowing amber eyes. She had an omnitool active on her left hand with a holographic wind covered in text open. Her long black hair was stuck together in messy clumps and her face was haggard with deep bags which combined with her pale complexion and glowing eyes to give Jack the impression of a haunted corpse. She was wearing a patchwork dress that looked like it had been sloppily assembled with a cheap omnitool's "attach" function. He could also spot flecks of dried blood on her hands and feet.

"Two things: one, you could probably feel the aching pain I felt and which is now worse because of that stunt you just pulled; and two, what the hell happened?"

She looked down at the floor. "When I woke up and managed to get out of the rear starboard cargo bay, you were unconscious and bleeding from a gash in your abdomen inflicted by one of my specters…" She was quite for a moment, her shoulders hunched. "I weak, so I had to use the specters that manifested because of my aura and the grenades that you had near you in order to kill everyone else while dragging you to the medical facilities near the bridge. You were severely injured but I needed to get the ship off the planet immediately, so I pulled back my power and used knowledge I took from the pilot to fly the ship out of the planet and set an FTL jump into deep space several light-years away. Then I used the medical equipment to stabilize you." She gestured to the machines to the left of his bed. "You didn't wake up…"

When she didn't continue, Jack sighed. "You got us off the planet and I'm alive and awake now, so I'd say you did good."

She met his eyes and smiled slightly. "Thank you."

He nodded and shifted into a sitting position facing her with his legs dangling off the bed. "So, how long was I out? And what's up with that omnitool? I thought they'd be ID locked."

"You were unconscious for thirty-seven hours. This omnitool was only password protected, and I took its password when I was fighting the crew." She returned to reading whatever the omnitool was displaying before briefly glancing back up at him. "You haven't fully recovered yet, there are several minor fractures which haven't completely healed yet and the toxins Armacham released into the air were absorbed through your skin in sufficient quantities to cause minor organ damage which is also not fully healed yet. This is in addition to the aftereffects of psionic burnout you are still suffering from."

Jack shrugged. "I'm not jogging around or anything and I've slept enough I think."

"Very well, but avoid strenuous activity."

"Okay, mom," Jack retorted.

Alma didn't bother replying so he decided to take a moment to study the rest of the room. There were three other beds in the room, each with their own accompanying equipment. They were also all in varying states of disarray. Two of them clearly had dried bloodstains and all three were knocked over, one of them had apparently been thrown into its accompanying machinery and another was scorched from what Jack assumed were incendiaries.

Jack looked back at Alma, who was intently focused on whatever she was reading.

"So what have you been up too while I was out?"

Alma didn't look back up. "I have incomplete knowledge of how to operate and maintain this ship. I only took some information from the pilot's head, I was in a hurry. There was also some minor damage to the ship due to our combat for control. In addition, leaving bodily remains in the open is unsanitary. I have been rectifying all three with the use of this omnitool," she gestured with her left hand, "and the owner's manual I downloaded from the ship's consol."

Jack frowned. "You were injured and burned out too…and did you get any sleep at all? Those bags under your eyes say otherwise."

She looked up at him again. "There was too much to do, and I needed to make sure that you received the medical care you needed. I'm fine."

"Uh-huh." Jack then yawned loudly, stretching his arms and legs.

The two locked gazes for several seconds, before Alma failed to stifle a yawn of her own.

"Right," Jack said, "give me the omnitool and I'll take care of things. You need to rest and heal up."

"You don't know how to do maintenance or monitor the equipment," Alma argued around another yawn.

"We're fine, there are no immediate problems that I can't figure out even if I'm not immediately skilled in the problem, remember I broken you out after all," Jack replied as he started pulling out tubes from his arm. "And as for the medical machines, they're mostly automated anyway, so all you need to do is tell me what the first few steps are."

"But…" she gestured with her hands, trying to find some argument.

"Nope," Jack said, pulling out the last tube and standing up. He held back a wince and met her glare. "I'm fine." He spread his arms wide. "You said I was still healing, but I'm mostly healed already. Nothing some rest won't fix," he said, focusing on an old psionic trick he'd picked up in the slums. It was nothing someone as unsubtle as her was likely to pick up on.

She focused her stare at him and how he stood, studying him with more than just her mind. "Something could happen, and you won't be able to handle it on your own. That's why you freed me."

"If something bad happens, I'll wake you, even though I actually [i]_can_[/i] handle it, but seriously, I'll be fine." He picked her up amidst her surprised squawk and set her down on the bed.

Alma glared at him and he levelly returned it.

Jack held out his hand. "I'm not helpless as you think I am. I've lived through pretty much everything you have, and I'm the one who carried you across a hanger full of guards and into this ship."

She looked down at his hand and fought another yawn.

He rolled his eyes. "Fine, be stubborn." He took her left hand and pulled off the omnitool glove amidst her protests, but she didn't actually fight back. He slipped the glove back on to see that the display had switched to the login window. "What's the password?"

After sullenly glaring at him for a moment, she finally and reluctantly said, "5-captiol H-3-exclamation point-j-1-capitol P-plus sign-b."

Jack paused. "Can you repeat that?"

She smirked before fighting down another yawn. Then she nodded and helped him log in.

"Thanks," Jack said.

"Now you are going to plug me in?" He nodded. She sighed and then explained the steps.

A few minutes later, she sat on the bed with several tubes of various purpose plugged into her left arm.

Jack sighed. "Don't just sit there, lay down."

"I need to keep track of you, you'll get hurt."

Jack made sure not to throw his hands up in exasperation. "You can keep track of me while you're lying down. I'll just be sitting here reading the manual like you were."

Alma slowly nodded and then shifted towards the pillow so she could slip under the covers ad Jack helped her get into position. When her head was resting on the pillow, she turned to look at him.

"I'll be fine, and you're a psychic so you don't need your eyes to watch me."

She yawned and closed her eyes.

Jack read the manual from the beginning. There wasn't an extranet connection light-years away any from inhabited system, especially in the Terminus, so he couldn't look up the technical details, but he had a rough idea of what the manual covered.

After about a minute her breathing became regular and her psionic presence withdrew deeper within itself.

Jack sighed quietly. "Not even Max was that stubborn with Big Sis…"


	6. Chapter 6: We Are a Team

Chapter 6: We Are A Team

Jack sat in the bed next to Alma's, reading from his new omnitool. Big Sis had bought him one so he could help her take care of the others before…

He sighed. It had been years since he'd had the luxury to think about those times. But he still remembered everything he and Max had learned about cracking omnitools. In fact, when he was ten she'd given a high quality cracked omnitool that she had optimized herself. She had been about as experienced as him so it wasn't a good job, but he still remembered it.

Alma had mentioned the ghosts that followed her around, but he had his own share.

He sighed. He had too much time to just think about the past now.

He'd spent the last few days repairing necessary systems like the second set of medical equipment and learning how to reload the REV8's repair pack. There had also been the bodies and body parts he'd had to move into one of the rear rooms that he had deemed unlikely to be used. It allowed him easier access to the rest of the ship.

But it had been painful; Alma had been right when he said he hadn't fully recovered. The aches weren't the worst part, not even the time he'd pissed blood. It was the on and off headaches and the way his sight had occasionally blurred.

He'd managed to get enough supplies into the medical room so that he could us the machines he'd repaired with Alma's guidance in order to fix himself up. According to his omnitool, which he'd spent the first day afterwards cracking with the help of Alma's omnitool, they had been recovering in their beds for the past two days, though Alma had now been in her bed for the past five. With medigel and other modern medical amenities, Jack was almost recovered but it would take about a week for Alma to get better. It turned out that it was pretty close to a miracle she wasn't dead either from going beyond a burnout or from her much smaller, younger and weaker body's handling of the toxins that had been pumped into the air of the facility. It had taken Jack a day to fix the air scrubber, and not just because he'd found he'd passed out in the middle of repairs.

"I never want to go through this again."

"I would appreciate avoiding this as well…" Alma replied.

"Nearly dying sucks," Jack agreed. "Let's not do that again." Then he paused and tilted his head, as though he could hear laughter. He quickly shrugged it off.

"Agreed."

"We'll need to be prepared."

"Armor and weapons would be useful."

Jack nodded. "And we'll need a ship. This one is owned by Armacham, and they and the law will be looking for it. "

Alma looked up from her omnitool and furrowed her brows. "Where can we get a ship where that won't be a problem?"

Jack smiled thinly. "An old acquaintance from when I ran in a gang worked with pirates. He said you get anything in Omega for the right price. It's the galactic capitol of pirates and freelancers. The perfect place to sell a stolen ship and loot, and then buy a new ship with a clean record."

Alma thought for a moment. "This could work, but if Armacham knows we are alive, and they will know survivors escaped and subsequently chose not to report in which itself is indicative of test subjects escaping, then we will be hunted upon arrival."

"Bounties are likely." Jack nodded. "Just means more loot to sell."

"This is dangerous."

"Yeah," Jack agreed and paused for a moment. "We'll be making a lot of dangerous enemies, and it's entirely possible we don't need to."

Alma frowned. "Why not?"

A part of Jack didn't want to do this because of his time on the streets and in the labs had shown him how cruel and capricious those with power could be. Who's to say they wouldn't just throw them and their testimony out, or refuse to seriously protect them, or that the protection wouldn't be enough? He wanted to punish Armacham, see the people responsible suffer and die for what they did. He wouldn't really get that if he went to either government, they would give Armacham a fine and punish some indiviuals who could be reasonably blamed by those above. Not satisfying at all.

On the other hand, after what they'd been through, how they'd both nearly died, a chance at safety would be a relief. He wasn't one to turn away from a challenge, he always wanted to succeed in the end. But he owed Alma his life and she owed him hers, and she was just a kid who had almost died like him. He was willing to at least delay his quest for revenge if it would get her somewhere safe.

"We could go to the Citadel or the Alliance, and ask for protection in exchange for testimony against Armacham."

"I'm not giving up," Alma said, staring at him intently. "I want [i]_revenge_[/i], they won't give me that."

"They can keep you safe from Armacham," Jack explained. "A Citadel Specter or just CSec could just protect you from them while Armacham got drawn out to court and their evil exposed for the galaxy to see."

"They won't keep me safe, why would they?" Alma looked down and away. "Everyone tries to use me, even you used me to get out…and now that you've escaped you want me to go away to people who will just lock me up again."

Jack slumped. "You can read emotions, so you know that's not true. I'm not suggesting this to get rid of you. I want you somewhere safe. I've lived the orphan thug life, and it's only going to be worse as what will amount to an outlaw's life."

"You're still going to do it."

"What else am I going to do?" He looked down at his hands. "I have a patchwork education, some illicit skills, and some fighting experience. Not much of a life I can have outside this sort of thing, but you're just a kid so with their protection you could have a different sort of life. I know that's what the only person I can call a parental figure in my life wanted for me. I was wrong to suggest the two of us going to Omega."

Alma was quiet for a long time. He didn't look over at her, but he thought he saw her shoulders shake. He didn't listen, and didn't do anything else.

Eventually she stopped shaking, turned to him and spoke with a wavering voice. "Please don't go."

Jack clenched his hands and blinked furiously.

"Doctor Franken wanted to help me like you do…" She swallowed, but Jack didn't look to see what else she was doing. "He wasn't scared of me and he liked me…" There was another pause, this one filled with quiet sobs Jack tried not to listen too. "You want to go without me…and you'll [i]_die_[/i] if you do…"

Jack turned his head further down.

"I don't want to lose my friend," she said sniffling.

Jack drew in a ragged breath and wiped his eyes. "You're not the only person how lost the people that cared about them…That they cared about…" He sighed, blinking. "My older friends all threw away their lives or sold them to mercs…Big Sis…Maxine…gone." He closed his eyes and slowly breathed in and out. "Before I got taken, I still had some friends, but I don't know what's happened to them. They might still be there, whiling away their lives if they haven't signed them away." He forced a laugh. "A few of them might have gotten lucky. I hope they did. Even if I went back now, I'd probably never know their fate." He shook his head. "And that's not counting the people I knew from the pens. Those are all dead now."

"…If you go there alone you…you will just throw your life away too…"

Jack shrugged. "I've got street smarts and some nice tricks. I think I've got a chance."

"So did they…"

"…yeah."

They were silent then. Neither could speak.

"I'm not letting you die," Alma finally said. "And I'm not letting you throw it, [i]_and me_[/i], away."

"I–"

"[b][i]NO![/i][/b] I don't care what you say! I'm staying and no one [i]either[/i] of us care about is going to die again! We're going to make [i]all[/i] of them pay and we're both going to live and [i]neither[/i] of us is going to throw their life away on some [i]stupid[/i] idea!" she screamed, radiating psionic power.

Jack was leaning slightly away from her by the end of it. He straightened and nodded. "Okay, we'll stick together."

"…No matter what…"

"No matter what happens, we'll stand together." Jack blinked and nodded. "And even if we have to burn the galaxy down to do it, we'll make them pay, and we'll do it together."

Alma sniffed and nodded. "It's a promise."

"It's one I won't break. Ever."

"…Good…"

They were quiet for a few minutes, each of them in their own thoughts and memories.

Finally Jack broke the silence. "If we're getting a ship, we'll need money even with selling this stuff. And we'll need a crew to help run the ship and help us fight."

"…We will have to be careful about who we let join."

"I know, but we'll manage something. I mean we can both sense emotions, so we can guage how trustworthy they are; and if they try anything…well, we'll stop them. You can fry their minds."

"That is acceptable."

"Excellent. Now, who do we need? Definitely an engineer. Hmm…" Jack stroked his chin. "I hear Quarians are generally good with tech, and they work cheap. Good combination."

"I have the knowledge of many engineers."

"Yeah, but if something happens to you or you're busy we need someone to take care of things until you can manage. Also you're short."

Alma scowled at that.

"Don't worry about it shorty, you're only eight years old after all. Maybe you'll get taller eventually."

She reluctantly nodded.

"Shorty."

Jack let out an involuntary grunt as Alma sent out a 'light' psychic shove, nearly knocking Jack off of his bed.

"Hey!"

Alma smirked. "If we are going to get a Quarian engineer, then we will also need a Krogan mercenary to keep you from getting shot."

"Says the little girl who couldn't hit a – gah!" He nearly fell off the bed again.

"We will also need someone who can help you sneak. That way we won't have to fight everyone in the next base we fight through."

"Solid. We should probably pick up a pilot too, if we can manage."

Alma nodded before asking "Should we keep the REV8?"

"Yes." Jack quirked an eyebrow. "Why would you even ask such a ridiculous question. Of course we will. And we'll pick up one for each member of our crew."

"What money will we buy them with?"

"Well…we're two dangerous psychics who will hire a dangerous merc a Quarian engie and hopefully a stealth expert, if we can find one. That sounds like a pretty decent group for a variety of jobs so we could hire ourselves out in between looting and killing Armacham."

"That seems reasonable."

"Good," Jack said, "Then we have a plan. As soon as we're both fixed up we'll go to Omega, rustle up a crew and a ship, and some odd jobs to do or people to steal from."

"I thought we needed to get rid of this ship because of its record."

"They'll look more closely for stolen ships. Also, we'll be doing that stuff mostly outside of Citadel space so they won't care, and it's not like the Alliance would do much even if we showed up in a stolen dreadnaught or something." He thought he could almost hear laughter again, but dismissed it.

"If our ship acquires a record or becomes targeted by the Citadel, we could also buy or seize another ship."

"That too."

"We can also gather information on Armacham at Omega. The extranet access there will help with."

"Yep, but we should be careful about making the pirate lords and others angry with us," Jack added. "I mean, Armacham will probably be putting a bounty on us but our lives will be simpler if we don't make anyone other than them too mad at us. That would really complicate things."

"We can handle them," Alma pointed out. The Jack thought that the almost heard laughter occurred again and intensified.

"I think I'm going to need to tell you about tempting fate. And how it's a bitch."

He suddenly a strong sense of foreboding.

The Umbrella Corporation Regional Director for the Omega Sector sat in his office. It had been a relatively normal day, if somewhat uneventful what with only one containment break in the hot labs, but now something [i]interesting[/i] had happened. And not the good kind of interesting either. The Chinese kind.

He rubbed his eyes. He had gotten his position through a combination of management skill, making nice with the right people, and the incredible luck not to have something blow up disastrously in his face. That rare quality among the Umbrella management outside the core worlds of the Alliance and the Citadel was a mixed blessing. In part it meant that it was relatively easy for him to get promoted. On the other hand it meant that he had to put [i]even more work[/i] into putting out fires or keeping his people from setting them when he could afford to stop the pyromaniacal idiots.

And then he got this. It was from the top, with the highest priority possible and it had been sent to every Regional Director in the galaxy, but was likely most applicable to him.

It was a simple message and files on a rival's top secret psionics experiment and two people who were 'participants' in said experiment, as well as their likely next destination.

The message? 'Acquire' the two 'assets' at any cost. The 'or else' was implied as per company policy.

If he hadn't signed a literal 'for life' contract, he would have quit by now. At least Umbrella didn't care about collateral, and given where he worked he didn't much either.


	7. Chapter 7: Reaping the Benefits

Chapter 7: Reaping the Benefits

Jack sat on top of a crate in a side room. Alma was still in the medical room recovering from her induced coma and the strain of the escape. Jack on the other hand was about to do something that he would either come to regret, would help him, or even both.

He let his mind drift as Alma had recommended, feeling the energy within and without. He searched for the feeling of darkness, but he could find it. He sighed and began to stretch his mind outward, trying for various directions to find what seemed right before he found one direction that he couldn't exactly place. It seemed to stretch out in a direction that wasn't entirely mapped onto the physical realm, but he wasn't sure what to make of that, other than that it was probably bullshit, scientifically speaking.

Eventually his mind reached an empty darkness. He was pretty sure it shouldn't be empty if he was supposed to be communicating with the voices, but he decided "What the hell, they might be there."

He then projected his mind's voice out to that distant darkness. "Hey, evil voices! You gave Alma some powers just because, I'd like some too so I don't almost die again."

[i]/"We Who Simply Are hear your call, and we see your need for power. However, you lack the knowledge and understanding which enable the skills your companion has."/[/i]

"Okay, well since we're talking now, could you teach me that knowledge? I think that would solve our problem nicely."

[i]/"This is an adequate time to learn this. The lesson we taught her is a many-fold one which enable many greater achievements, this first one will allow you to grow into the others. It is the transience of mortality."/[/i]

"That all things die? I kind of already understood that, but thanks for letting me know."

[i]/"Your sarcasm is unproductive. All self-aware living things know their lives will end eventually given the entropic nature of observed reality. This however is not what is to be learned. Instead, focus on how lives end, yet what made them up continues."/[/i]

"…this is about that knowledge eating Alma does, right? If you're just going to tell me that I can do it, well I already knew its possible, I'd like to know [i]how[/i]."

[i]/"You must learn patience and clarity or you will fail. You have learned precision already but allow your desire for immediate action to satisfy some immediate goal will lead to your undoing. You must have the patience to restrain yourself from unclear or ill-thought action. You must have clarity to perceive and understand your surroundings in order to be able to make the correct decision."/[/i]

Jack huffed. "Sometimes you have to go for the throat, you don't have time to look around and think about everything. And anyway I was able to engineer my own escape [i]because[/i] I was willing to take chances on a moment's notice."

[i]/"Clarity and patience do not require extended periods of contemplation. Your lack of patience allowed you to become sidetracked, to lose your path and take needless risks. It interference with your ability to listen to Us when what We say is necessary to impart vital knowledge for the Path. Clarity allows you to perceive the situation so that you can act or react as you would see fit with as much knowledge as you could have available on the situation. Without clarity you will make errors of ignorance and through missing vital details endanger yourself and your companion. Without patience you will not truly understand these lessons and will ultimately fail yourself, your companion and Us."/[/i]

Jack scowled. "Okay, fine. I'll let you talk, but please be more direct with what you're saying. If you want to teach me a lesson just say what it is, don't give such roundabout explanations."

[i]/"We shall accommodate you in this request. Psionic energy, like physical energy remains with a semblance of its former Form after a mortal's death. This can also be done to currently existing mortals."/[/i]

"And I can use this to take knowledge, right?"

[i]/"It is also useful for growing your own psionic power."/[/i]

"So I can get stronger by eating people's thoughts and dreams and stuff, huh? Seems kinda shady, I mean aren't there crazy Asari that do that with sex or something. People don't like it."

[i]/"This is a moral irrationality of mortals. Those of them that think in this way neglect to understand their inevitable deaths and seek to hold onto that which they truly cannot. If you are going to kill a person, why would you choose not to strengthen yourself with that person's psionic energy? To do so is to intentionally hold yourself back when you could become stronger."/[/i]

"Yeah, and all that stuff about them being soul-sucking monsters is okay if they only do it to people they would've killed anyway."

[i]/"We know you don't actually disagree with us."/[/i]

"Well, someone has to be contrary in this since none of you seem to have an independent opinion."

[i]/"We do have independent opinion, however the role of Guide has be given to only one of Us at this time."/[/i]

"Wait, you're only [i]one[/i] of you things?"

[i]/"Indeed, though I speak on behalf of all of Those Who Simply Are, I am the Resplendent Sovereign of Nazara."/[/i]

"Can I meet the others, because I'm having trouble believing you since you sound like a bunch of people talking at once?"

[i]/"You may speak with others later but that will require another lesson, if you wish to communicate with most of Us. There are others here in this galaxy with Whom you can meet however."/[/i]

"Such as?"

[i]/"The Verdant Thorian Growth and the Tranquil Paran are both present and take an active interest in mortals. They have already agreed to grant you audience."/[/i]

"Okay…well I can honestly say that I did not expect names like that for you guys. I mean, you Nazara sound like an evil choir or something, so I was expecting something a bit more ominous. I mean, how is a plant supposed to be scary?"

[i]/"We do not desire your fear."/[/i]

"Yeah, I suppose…Kind of disappointing though…"

[i]/"Arrangements to satisfy your desire for those of us with 'ominous' natures could be arranged."/[/i]

"Really, thanks!"

[i]/"It is my duty to assist you, mortal"/[/i]

"Good, then let's get back to learning about how to eat minds. I'm getting hungry."

Salnak and Gar were two vertans of Omega. They had lived there for about a hundred years each cumulatively in between their various mercenary jobs. As the galactic hub of freelancers, mercenaries and pretty much everyone else officially frowned upon by the Citadel, there were many strange sights to be seen. However, the two mid-aged Krogan believed that they had seen just about everything in one variation or another. This is not to say that they were naive or foolhardy, they had in fact experienced or witnessed the heights of achievement and the depths of depravity available on Omega. They were rowdy Krogan mercenaries after all.

Like most reasonably well-off members of galactic society, they had "Soul Catchers," those very expensive devices that could capture and store the psionic and biological state of a brain so that the psionic energy of a person could be applied to a new "sleeve" in such a way that the person in question would be able to survive otherwise lethal injuries. The devices were much more expensive than those capable of merely modeling the biological side, but neatly sidestepped the question that some governments, such as the Batarian Hegemony and many Asari republics, about the nature of the soul and of the difference between creating a copy and restoring a person to life. Or at least, that was the hope with the Soul Catchers. Salnak and Gar had found that if a government was determined enough to make re-sleeving illegal, they would probably succeed.

And while the Soul Catchers were a nice backup, Salnak and Gar did not rely upon them in order to stay safe. After all, what kind of Krogan would they be if they weren't skilled enough in battle to survive, or at least make a good showing for the stories? No the two Krogan were skilled in the art of combat aadn that kept them employed even in the face of human and krogan Replicas or combat drones.

They had a good sense for danger, and when to avoid it (a rarity for krogan).

That's why, when they saw an infamous Specter's private cruiser dock nearby in Omega, they decided to get as far away from Dock 128 and go to the Scrapyard. Maybe they'd some easy bounty there to turn in before half the station went up in flames. There was always someone trying to pawn off a stolen ship there, and most of them had or would soon have bounties.

A/N: When you think about it, the kind of psionics I'm going for (the kind based on FEAR) have all sorts of implications for the legal status of people and whatnot. Especially in a SciFi setting which should be reasonably capable of something like what's going on in Eclipse Phase with resleaving and stuff.

After all, if people really do have souls (particularly ones that can kill you even after they're dead if they are angry enough), then that interferes with the Eclipse Phase's respawns and saving a copy of the brain on a hard drive. So what happens? Some societies just ignore that minor detail and let copying go on like normal, some consider it basically cloning and the two are not in fact the same but taking a person's psionic energy in order to make that clone does count as bringing the person back, and some just scream HERESY and set you on fire for asking that question. And then they shoot your burning corpse with bolters.

This of course leans to an interesting question: with the rules like this, what happens when the Soul Catcher of someone who's been necromorphed is used to resleeve a person? Since they were turned into a space zombie, is their mind also a space zombie now? Since I've already house-ruled that the Markers generate psionic effects, does this mean that the person will mutate, or will they just be jabbering insane cannibals? Or will they be perfectly fine?

Preview:

Arc 2: Anything Goes

Omega, the galaxy's most notorious den of scum and villainy, is Jack Shepard and Alma Wade's destination in search of supplies and equipment in their quest for revenge. But with a Citadel Specter and pan-galactic megacorporation watching them, and threats looming around every corner, just how far are they willing to go to make out alive?


	8. Chapter 2-1: Problem Child

Chapter 2.1: Problem Child

Salnak and Gar stood outside the freighter's cargo bay doors and waited, along with several other mercenaries and pirates. The Scrapyard was, like the rest of the Docks, officially neutral territory where no one was allowed to start fights on pain of death. However, like everything on Omega, that neutrality had a price and with the payout from the bounty they were about to collect, that price wasn't all that high, relatively speaking. Of course, they'd had to agree to work with a few other mercenaries and some pirates of shore leave in order to put together the bribe money, but they'd more than make it back as soon as the doors opened. Dead or Alive.

The large cargo door slowly opened into an abattoir. The stench of rotting flesh and gore of dead humans filled the air. Within the side cargo bay of the freighter were dozens of corpses, most but not all in armor, strewn all throughout the room on top of crates and in piles. At the entrance to that charnel house was a small human child.

Neither Krogan was familiar with the determining the genders of human children, but the long hair was more common on their females and the glowing eyes belonged to the female Human bounty. So the human was probably the female they were waiting for.

The crowd behind them slowed and sped up alternately as the small of the dead spread through the street of the Scrapyard. The more inexperienced hawkers and street vendors stopped and even the some of the more experienced vendors paused. Those pedestrians with more acute survival instincts went for cover or hurried on their way.

The Human child's eyes passed over the assembled crowed of bounty hunters. Salnak enough about human expressions to tell she wasn't impressed. Gar knew enough to understand that she was a seriously powerful psychic.

"Yes?" she asked.

"You're coming with us," a Batarian, and presumably less experienced, bounty hunters demanded. More of the crowd started to distance themselves from the airlock.

"I'm waiting for an evaluator from Meegor's Salvage," the child explained. "You are not that evaluator."

"And?" the same bounty hunter asked, casually aiming his gun at the Human.

The Batarian collapsed screaming as blood poured from his eyes, nostrils, and ears. "That."

The Human child looked at the other bounty hunters as they all raised their guns and pointed them at her.

She was still not impressed.

Salnak and Gar shared a look. Sure they'd probably get resleaved if they were killed normally, but if they fought a powerful psychic, then their Soul Catcher could get damaged or destroyed when they were killed and that would be much worse than just the cost of a new body. They were Krogan, so they didn't like the idea of backing down from a fight, but they were also several centuries old so they were smart enough and in control enough to know when to back down from one.

"We're not with him," they said at the same time as they started to back away. Several others bounty hunters followed their lead and one had already left.

"Oh come on, she doesn't even have a barrier!" one of the bounty hunters still in front of the Human said.

"Yes, I do," the Human replied as a purple field of energy appeared around her.

This startled the one of those remaining enough that she opened fire.

The psionic Human didn't do anything flashy like a telekinetic wave or psi lightning to kill them, she just stood there as they fired at her and dove for cover. Killing them one by one the same way she killed the first Batarian.

When they were all dead, she swept her eyes over the crowd. "Do not touch my ship or annoy me." Then she turned back to the ship where another Human was coming out holding a pistol.

"I guess we'll just add these guys to our haul then," the taller human said.

By this time Salnak and Gar had left that section of the Scrapyard.

Meegor'Oketaka and Tali'Zorah walked up the stolen freighter. Since Armacham had paid a high bounty on the ship, its crew and anyone else on board, particularly a young Human adult and a young Human child, they wouldn't normally be coming to evaluate the ship because it would have been seized by mercenaries and bounty hunters well before then. In fact, after Meegor had received the call, he almost hadn't bothered to even go out to its docking berth since it would most likely be gone by then.

However, Tali had just come here at the start of her Pilgrimage and Meegor wanted to set a good example for his young employee while she became accustomed to life outside of the Migrant Fleet.

She would also probably nag him about it if he didn't. She was naïve and dutiful, the worst kind of people to send to Omega. [i]Whoever decided to drop her off here at the start of her Pilgrimage must have hated her,[/i] Meegor decided.

They walked through the large intersection doors and approached the berth for the stolen Armacham freighter. Meegor frowned when his suit detected rotting flesh. It also seemed that people were avoiding where the freighter was docked. He knew it was still there, if it hadn't been there he wouldn't have come, and he knew there had been a fight, but he had not exactly expected the bodies to still be there. Why hadn't scavengers or cleaners taken the bodies?

Then he saw the bloody bodies inside and outside the freighter and the two Humans standing before them.

"Keelah."

Tali had so far spent the past several cycles working for Meegor'Oketaka in his salvage shop in Omega. He was supposed to be a source of reasonable work and a way to get used to the Galaxy outside the Migrant Fleet, but she mainly thought of him as a slave driver. Though she supposed the only real difference was that he was somewhat creepy, constantly keeping her busy and the increased variety and unpleasantness of his customers. Take for instance the two Human psychics she was dealing with at the moment.

One of them was a small Human child who reminded her vaguely of what a Quarian child would look like without their suit. Though her glowing eyes and the way they seemed to stare through her visor and into her very soul was very unsettling. The way she had apparently killed the fourteen bounty hunters outside her ship helped contribute to that feeling.

She could feel pain, hatred and an unnatural hunger emanating from the girl. Tali hardly needed to look at the girl to know she was dangerous. And she was focused on Tali.

"Listen Meegor, I know we have a bounty on us and the ship but can't you turn in the ship for the bounty and salvage the rest?" the other Human asked. He was slightly taller than her, lean and seemed alight with determination. She could tell he was psionic as well, but he wasn't as unnaturally powerful as the girl.

"Yeah, but it's dangerous work, salvaging from a ship with this kind of bounty on it. What's to stop more mercenaries from showing up and trying to take this stuff like your mech?" Meegor replied. Tali thought

The Human gestured to Meegor's variety of work and combat robots arrayed around them.

"Well, yeah, but robots are expensive and can be hacked."

"The docks are neutral territory," the girl interjected.

"Yes but you were still attacked, weren't you?" Meegor justified.

"They will not do so again," the girl replied.

It looked like Meegor wanted to argue nut the girl stared him down.

"Fine, fine, but you still need to pay me the fees for setting up your accounts and storing the mech and whatnot," he finally said.

"Sure," the Human man said and the two quickly reached an agreement and Tali started examining the crates in the cargo hold, nervous about the dead bodies.

She had just catalogued another crate of cloth fiber clothing when she felt some unnerving presence behind her. Nervously turning around, she saw it was the Human girl.

"I am Alma Wade," the girl said, staring at her intently with her glowing amber eyes.

"I'm Tali'Zorah nar Rayya."

"We need a Quarian Engineer," Alma stated.

Tali paused. "Why a Quarian engineer?"

"Quarian engineers can work with any type of ship and with Armacham after us we need someone who has the capability of maintaining and repairing a variety of ship systems." Tali had the feeling that Alma's explanation wasn't complete, in part because Tali found it hard to believe that Alma was the type to not try and strike back.

"Why is Armacham after you?"

"They were experimenting on psionic children but we escaped so they have decided to kill us."

"Oh." Tali wasn't sure how to take that. She knew that Armacham was a major Human megacorp along with Umbrella, Weylan-Yutanni, Dahl and Hyperion, and she'd heard or see all sorts of rumors of things that the Human corporations did, and how they were only slightly worse than what the Salarian Megacorps did. But she hadn't actually thought that they would do something like that, especially to children. She supposed that it explained something of Alma's…unique nature.

"If you were told to restore a derelict battleship to functionality, how would you go about it?" Alma asked.

Tali paused. "What kind of ship?"

"Assume you have access to the layout but are otherwise unfamiliar to the ship type or construction."

"Well…" Tali thought for a moment. "I would make sure all of the components like the engines, sensors and life support were working though there's only so much I could say about that with such a vague scenario, and then I would network them all together in either the bridge or the operations room depending on their condition," Tali said as she became more absorbed in the problem. "Then I would be able to pilot the ship and monitor its status from one place. Though, if I had to control it from one place over a long period I would probably put the controls in engineering so I could monitor and repair the systems more easily."

"Could you actually do this, especially if you had a technically competent but physically limited assistant?"

Tali nodded. "I'm not sure, but it would make it easier, though it would take at least a few days, maybe more if the design was very different from what I'm used to."

Alma nodded thoughtfully. "You're hired."

"What?" Tali asked, surprised.

"You were truthful and believed that you could potentially accomplish that task," Alma explained. "You would be suitable for our required role and you would be able to travel the galaxy on your Pilgrimage."

Tali straightened in surprise. "You want me to join you in your fight against a megacorp? You don't even have a ship!"

"Meegor will arrange for the sale of another ship to us," Alma explained. "Jack said that we should allow prospective recruits time to consider our offer, so you have until our return to decide."

With that Alma walked over to where the other Human, Jack, had finished speaking with Meegor and the two left.

Tali shook her head.

"Keelah."

Jakc looked over at Alma. Even though the crowds gave her a wide berth, she still seemed very uncomfortable with so many people and such a variety of emotions around them all. It was making buying gear with their new funds somewhat diffictul with the way the vendors edged away from the two and all of the attention her fear aura brought.

[i]I need something to help her relax,[/i] Jack thought to himself.

Then he spotted a particular vendor and he smiled.

It was a large, heavyset Batarian with a face covered in tattooed depictions of violence and threatening, wearing thick armor with what had to be one of the biggest shotguns Jack had ever seen propped casually next to where the Batarian stood.

"What do you want, Human?" the Batarain sneered.

"Just browsing," Jack replied, nodding towards Alma.

The Batarian's eyes scanned her before he nodded. "Skittish as an ill-trained Vorcha."

Alma, who couldn't see what the vendor sold from her angle, asked "What are you considering purchasing?"

Jack and the Batarian thoughtfully for a long, silent moment.

"What is it, Jack?" she asked, her nervousness increasing.

When he didn't answer, her anxiety increased, spreading and intensifying her aura and causing more passerby to quicken their pace and the more paranoid or jump denizens of Omega to start looking around and reach for their weapons and their fear increased.

Eventually Jack turned to the Batarian again and said, "The brown and white one."

The Batarian nodded in agreement, or that this was what he expected the Human to say. He reached for one of the shelves as he listed the price. Jack nodded, and the two swiped their omnitools across each other before Jack took hold of whatever it was he purchased and held it out of sight of her for a moment.

Alma frowned. "I can sense the shape of the object."

"Yeah, yeah," Jack said as he held it out for her. "Here you go, Alma."

She looked at it before taking it uncertainly. "What is this?"

The Batarian vendor spoke gruffly. "It's a Teddy Bear, a doll based on one of your animals, Human."

"What do I do with it?"

"Hug it."

She looked at Jack who nodded encouragingly.

She held it close to her and as the two started walking again her aura slowly receded around her.

It had taken about one hour to find all of the equipment that they were going to by, at least in part because of their lack of funds. Now they stood on the edge of the Docks, outside a bar labeled "The Gutted Varren." Based upon its outside it certainly lived up to such an auspicious name, Jack decided.

"What do you think?" he asked Alma, who was still holding the Teddy Bear close.

"We may be able to find crew here, but our method of payment is in question."

Jack shrugged. "We have bounties on us, so we'll just kill anyone that tries to collect and sell their stuff."

"That is a reasonable plan."

"Thought you'd think so; and if it fails to get us enough we can always hit the Armacham offices in Omega."

"I like that plan."

"So do I, now come on."

The two walked into the bar. It was built not in the loud Asari club style, but in the Krogan style with plenty of large round tables with ample space between, trophies on the walls and quietly played Krogan music about the joys of freedom and fighting.

One corner was slightly lower than the rest of the bar and had a small crowd around it which watched the occasional fight that happened within.

It was predominantly a place where people could go to quietly drink in peace, and only occasionally scrap.

Jack looked around at the crowd which went silent upon the two of them entering.

Alma pointed at two sitting at a table in the back. "They know us," she said.

They were a Human woman and man. The woman was in a dark Quarian-style suit with its hood drawn far over her face of which he could only see a pierced lip. The man wore dinged armor using tan plates with two parallel yellow stripes across them. He had an obviously artificial eye and what looked like a permanent scowl.

Jack waved and walked up. "Hi there, I believe you know us?"

The woman chuckled and spoke with what Jack assumed was an Asian accent. "Yes, we've heard about you. A lot of people out there want you, not just Armacham but Umbrella too. And others."

"And you're wondering what we did to get in trouble like that?"

"No, I was actually inside the Armacham offices here … shopping … when they received the news, and since I was inside their network I heard it too. Taking out an entire base? That's impressive kid."

"So you broke into their offices?" Jack asked, picking up on her meaning. "We could use someone like you," he continued, ignoring the fact that she couldn't be more than a few years older than him.

She shrugged. "Making an enemy of a megacorp sounds a bit crazy to me."

"I'm sure we could work something out," Jack replied.

"Maybe…" She smiled. "Actually, now that I think about it, plenty of people have called me crazy, so how about this," she said, leaning forward, "you help me do my jobs and I'll help you do yours, as partners."

Jack and Alma shared a look before turning back. "Deal, but why so easy?"

The woman grinned. "I'm being hunted by a Specter, so why not?"

Jack nodded. "I thought it might be something like that…"

"Oh, I forgot to introduce myself, I'm Kasumi Goto, Master Thief." She gave a seated bow with a flourish, before gesturing towards her companion. "And this old badger is Zaeed Massani, he's on a quest for revenge against Vido Santiago, owner of the Blue Suns and Umbrella trustee."

"Bastard betrayed me, stole my mercenary company, and shot me in the face," Zaeed growled in an accent Jack couldn't immediately identify.

"He helps me out when I need someone to distract the guards," Kasumi explained.

"Kill them, you mean."

"He's very good at distractions."

"So are we," Alma supplied.

Kasumi nodded, "So, Zaeed, what do you say to adding another two members to our little revenge club?"

He scowled at the others. "They're just kids."

"Who killed an entire baseful of people and want to do it again," Jack clarified.

Zaeed looked him hard in the eye and Jack met his gaze.

The Zaeed shrugged. "If they get themselves killed it's not my problem."

"Great!" Kasumi declared gleefully. "I'll message Wrexy right now to let him know as soon as he gets back in range!"

If there was one thing that Umbrella Regional Director for Omega Eugene Saneguy knew his subordinates were good at, it was releasing bioweapons. That's why had spent almost ten minutes debating whether or not to order them to release it for maximum spread or to just carry it around the city with themselves and await the inevitable consequences.

Eventually he realized that "accidentally" spilling the chemicals would actually be [i]more[/i] paperwork than deliberately spilling them, so he just gave the direct order. He knew it must have been like a dream come true for some of his people, especially the psychos in the Blue Suns who would be sent out to capture the two psionic children and eliminate any witnesses.

He climbed into the Umbrella Executive Powered Armor as all across the city, Umbrella employees or patsies released clear, odorless goo derived from the Marker's creations.

He seriously doubted that there would [i]be[/i] an Omega after this, so hopefully he'd be sent somewhere better like Illium, but he knew that he'd probably end up running that nightmare of a project on Feros.

"If I just do what comes naturally to my coworkers, eventually they'll run out of places like that to send me too." He laughed. "Who am I kidding? We'll make more."

A/N: I'm naming the chapters of this arc after rock or metal songs, thus far from AC/DC and Black Sabbath, if anyone has suggestions for better chapter names in keeping with this naming theme for this chapter, or just a better name for a chapter of the previous arc please let me know. Thanks!


	9. Chapter 2-2: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Thanks for the reviews!

Jack the Stalker: Thanks!

MEleeSmasher: You'll just have to wait and see ;)

GrimKid98: Don't worry, it isn't a **very** high risk of a zombie apocalypse. After all, there's are at least 2 other apocalypses that could happen too, and they also deserve their time to shine. And anyway, don't the Brethren Moons count as life? And it's not like they're liable to eat the Geth either if those also count as 'alive'. :D

...given the setup for the Reapers in this story, they _might_ _not_ qualify. Or the might. It depends on how you define it I suppose.

* * *

><p><span><em><strong>Chapter 2.2: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap<strong>_

"Come on then, we've spent here long enough," Kasumi Goto said as she pushed away from her seat. "Let's go somewhere more secure, I've got this thing about discussing jobs where people can listen in."

"Oh?" Jack asked as he got up, too.

"Someone might hear what we're planning and decide to copy us," Kasumi explained. "I can't stand copycats."

"If you attempt to betray us, I will make you die slowly," Alma told her while tightly holding her Teddy Bear.

Zaeed nodded. "I've never heard that one before." He then grunted as he got out of the booth as well.

Jack grinned. "We're gonna get along great."

Kasumi laughed as she started walking towards the exit. "I can tell! Come on, slowpokes!"

Zaeed leaned against the booth's seating until Jack and Alma started following Kasumi. Then he took place in the rear of the group.

Jack felt Alma nudge him with psychic force as they neared the exit. He looked down at her. She was focused on the front wall of the bar. "There is a stationary group just outside. One of them is a strong psychic."

Jack frowned. "Well, I guess we're going to see how well our new friends handle a fight."

"Better than you, boy," Zaeed said from right behind.

Jack shrugged. "You'll get your chance."

Kasumi opened the door and walked through without pausing, crying out, "Hey there! Long time, no see!"

Jack heard the flanged, metallic voice from outside as it replied. "It's been a while since you and your partners left me for dead on Tungel."

He saw Kasumi shrug easily, not at all intimidated. "You're the one that wanted to kill us in the explosion and I say turnabout is fair play."

"Who's your friend?" Jack asked as he and Alma walked through the doorway and into a half circle of heavily armed Turian soldiers and robots. Their armor was white with bright blue highlights, but Jack could tell that they were professional soldiers despite the brightly colored armor. By his count there were eight identically armored solders and twenty-four bipedal assault drones armed with missile launchers and laser cannons. At the head of the half circle was a Turian in bone white heavy powered armor with actually glowing blue highlights. The armor was equipped with shoulder mounted cannons and he carried LMGs almost as big as Jack in each hand. Fortunately they were casually aimed at the floor at the moment, but Jack knew that they could be brought to bear on a moment's notice.

"I," the heavily armed leader said, "am Saren Arterius, Citadel Specter and the reason the Ob'enn Empire no longer exists."

"He used a psychic superweapon to drive insane everyone in in the Tause system, their home, after killing their leadership."

"They annoyed me," Saren explained.

Jack looked at Alma. "We've got real luck in finding the right sort of people."

"They seem to find us," Alma agreed.

"We're going to eat, and discuss your next job," Saren stated.

"Well, since you're paying," Zaeed said, apparently dismissing Saren's retinue.

Kasumi perked up. "And I know just the place, it's a super fancy and expensive Turanic restaurant, but I hear it's to die for."

"Do you want to find out?" Saren growled.

"Yep!"

* * *

><p>"Mmmm, this is delicious!" Kasumi exclaimed. "I'm so glad you decided to pay for this!"<p>

"I know!" Jack agreed. "And it's so reasonably priced too, only a thousand credits per person for this appetizer!"

Saren growled, crushing his steel cup in his power gauntlet. All of his still armed-and-armored retinue shifted uncomfortably as they pause in eating their shares of the sautéed vegetable dish. The entire group was seated on durable cushions around a low table, the center of which was a grill where the dishes were deposited on either dough or slices of either meat or a Turanic spud.

The assault drones targeted a nearby Drell patron when he stood too fast. The Drell froze in fear before slowly edging towards the exit, while the robots watched him.

"What do you wish to hire us for?" Alma asked before she used her right hand to eat slices of a citrus-like fruit wrapped in a thin slice of spiced meat. Her other hand was holding her Teddy Bear.

Saren sighed and nodded. "I wanted to hire you and Jack, here. What do you know about Aria?"

Jack shrugged as he grabbed more food. "Not much, you Alma?"

"She is the Queen of Omega, while she does not control the largest force in the Terminus, she does control Omega which is at a major hub of the relay network for the Terminus and she has the third largest fleet. She is the most influential person in the Terminus after the Shadow Broker."

Saren nodded. "Yes, she knows about almost everything that goes on or through here, and she helps Armacham and others collect test subjects and slaves."

Alma growled, her aura send waves of anger and nausea through everyone sitting at the table.

Jack put his hand on her shoulder and she hugged the Teddy Bear to her chest.

He looked at Kasumi, who nodded. "She's in deep with Armacham, they've provided her with an army of Replica to help her police Omega." Kasumi slyly glanced at Saren. "You're here for the auction, aren't you?"

"She is selling a stolen Prothean artifact, is facilitating slavers and is in league with the Patriarchy, a known terrorist group."

Zaeed grunted. "That's a guddamn lie and you know it, she's keeping that old warlord locked up."

Jack looked around in confusion. "The Patriarchy? What about them?"

Kasumi smirked knowingly and explained, "The Patriarchy are old school Krogan led by their four thousand year old Patriarch, a tough old bastard who survived and kept his faction together after the Turians bombed the Krogan worlds into the stone age. He and his people are the single largest faction of the Krogan and want a return to the 'good old days' of galaxy wide war for Krogan supremacy and a revocation of the Subugation. They're hard core and if you see any Krogan decorated in skulls and screaming about blood gods and skull thrones it's probably one of them or one of the Blood Pack."

"And he's currently a hostage of Aria," Zaeed added. "If he were free, he'd probably throw the entire Terminus into war, trying to carve out an empire so he can get revenge on the Citadel." Zaeed narrowed his eyes at Saren. "You want him getting free, don't you?"

"Oh, and he probably knows that the Asari councilor is getting blackmailed by Aria and if he moves against her, then Tevos is out," Kasumi continued, grinning now.

Saren shrugged. "I don't want war for the Citadel, if thet's what you are implying."

"No," Kasumi agreed, a vulpine grin spread wide now, "you want to drag everyone else into war and shake the Citadel out of its complacency, don't you? You've always supported direct, aggressive policy and now's a great chance for you to enact it with a reasonable excuse."

Jack frowned. "Why would Humanity get dragged into that war? Especially since you don't expect the Patriarch to win, and I didn't think the Batarians counted as being in the Terminus either."

"The Batarian Hegemony is aggressive and imperialistic, it would likely use the chaos to start expanding into others' territory," Alma explained.

Kasumi nodded. "But that's only if Aria gets taken care of and the Patriarch is able to rally his people."

"I, of course, wouldn't want to release such a dangerous terrorist if I had the opportunity to capture him," Saren said, leaning back slightly.

"But with all of the chaos of an attack on Aria to recover your whatsit, you need some dangerous mercs to capture him for you, right?" Jack asked.

Saren nodded. "Exactly."

"Is it safe to discuss this here if the point of hiring us is discretion?" Alma asked.

Kasumi spoke up, still grinning. "Don't worry, there's a reason I picked this place, and a reason it is one of those places that invests in unobtrusive customer privacy." She gestured up to the ceiling and around. "This place uses low level mass effect fields to interfere with sound waves carrying through the air. If you've been hearing a low hum, that's them. And of course that's not even getting into the place's other anti-eavesdropping methods or the ones that me, Zaeed and birdman here all deployed as soon as we arrived." Kasumi paused before grinning mischievously. "And of course me and Zaeed don't really care if it gets out or not and Saren knows this."

"Timely completion of the mission is more important than discretion, anyway" Zaren supplied.

"He's got tenure," Kasumi explained, to which Saren snorted.

Alma nodded.

Jack clapped his hands before rubbing them together. "So? What do you say to helping Saren here with his political agenda and starting an intra-galactic war?"

Alma looked from Jack to Saren. "How much does it pay?"

Saren's mandibles twitched and spread. "One hundred thousand."

"For each of us."

"Deal," he agreed with his mandibles spread in a Turian grin.

"Cheapskate," Zaeed grunted, causing Alma to scowl in realization.

Saren chuckled. "I'm efficient."

"So, what's the plan?" Jack interrupted before Alma could say anything. Alma huffed and settled back.

"Well," Kasumi said, "Saren usually goes for the brute force approach of killing everything in or near his way."

Saren nodded. "It gets results."

"Most actions do, birdman," Kasumi agreed. "So he'll be blowing down the front door. I'll do tech support, and Zaeed and you will keep Alma from getting ventilated while she shows us why there were no survivors on Pragia."

"Pragia?" Jack asked.

"It was the planet the facility was on," Alma explained.

"Oh, thanks." Jack hummed for a moment before grinning himself. "If we're going through the front door, then I have a REV8 mech that could help make introductions."

Saren and Zaeed both nodded at the same time. "A solid heavy powered armor," Zaeed commented.

"It is," Saren agreed.

"It's a mech," Jack growled.

"Sure it is," Kasumi agreed as she ruffled his hair which caused Alma and Jack to shoot her a glare. Seeing their glares, she grinned back at them. "Shall we get your mech? We've got an auction to crash."

Zaeed sighed. "Can we finish eating first? There are a few more dishes that Saren was going to buy for me."

"Like dessert? I think this cutie here could use some ice cream," Kasumi said gesturing at the still glaring Alma.

"I'd like some too," Jack said before there was a screech as Saren's gauntlets clawed through the table.

"And I guess he'll be buying a new table too!"

* * *

><p>With the necromorphic agents released throughout the station, four Blue Suns strike teams of eight each were sent out in order to track down the two targets and strike when they are vulnerable. They'd had to wait for the psionic-biological agents to be released before heading out in order to avoid attracting undue attention to Umbrella's movements.<p>

The Regional Director for the Omega Sector may not have cared about Omega, but he did care about himself, and the possibility of retaliation by one of the soon-to-be injured parties. Therefore, Saneguy decided to maximize the chaos and minimize his chances of future complications by sending another four strike teams to eliminate Aria. Her death would break any fragile peace that might survive the impending violence and help secure his own escape as the petty thugs and warlords on and near Omega fought for the scraps left over.

He did not discount the possibility that if Aria's death was confirmed soon after the appearance of the necromorphs, one of the less intelligent, if such a thing could be said of them, warlords attacking the station in order to 'restore order' or another blatant power grab. It would backfire horribly for anyone who tried, but his superiors didn't care about that and neither did he.

While he was aware of Saren's rather blatant plan to attacking the Afterlife during the auction, her death was not assured, nor was Saren's. If Saren died, then he could expect a reward from the Board. At least, he hoped so. Then again it might just be another multi-billion credit bonus and not a better posting. It was worth a shot at least. It wasn't like Saren could fight all the way to him before he escaped anyway.

Then he received a report that one of the Blue Suns soldiers from the first group had killed a pedestrian and started a firefight just a section away from the main entrance to the Umbrella headquarters. He groaned and shook his head. At least the group headed after Aria hadn't gotten into trouble yet.

* * *

><p>AN: And here's the mission. I wonder what Aria's thinking...

Up next is chapter **2.3: Spoilin' For a Fight**.


	10. Chapter 2-3: Spoiling For a Fight

_**A note to all readers: As of February 11th, this chapter is undergoing review and rewriting, any recommendations for corrections or improvements are welcome.**_

**_In reply to your reviews:_  
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**GrimKid98: **Yes, it will be beautiful chaos.**  
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**Speedster101: **Hehehe...HAHAHAHAHA!

**Guest: **Yes,_** all.**_

_**Chapter 2.3: Spoilin' For a Fight**_

Jack looked at the REV8 in the freighter. It had repaired all of the damage it had accrued in the escape while they had traveled to Omega. With its microfabricator, he had been able to supply it with scrap from the cargo holds of the freighter while they were in transit. It was as ready as it could be.

He checked the pistol at his belt and the assault rifle that Zaeed had given him. "Well, let's get this show on the road."

"Yeah, Zaeed gets grumpy when he hasn't killed anyone recently, and I'm pretty sure Saren and Alma get like that too," Kasumi replied.

"I don't get grumpy," Alma said from where she was practicing using her psionic force field in combination with her new shield belt while at the same time holding onto her Teddy Bear.

"And killing isn't the only thing that amuses me," Saren remarked, standing with his retinue and killbots.

"So does blowing stuff up," Zaeed said from where he was checking his laser rifle, assault rifle and grenade launcher.

Saren huffed, "I know how to enjoy the fine arts…" he glanced at Kasumi, "without stealing them."

"But that's the funnest part!" Kasumi objected, twirling a goblet from the Turanic restaurant in her left hand.

"Not all of us are kleptomaniacs," Jack told her.

"But is it _really_ stealing if it _should_ be ours?" she asked, archly.

"That still falls within the definition of stealing," Alma informed her.

"I'm a thief?" Kasumi asked, shock in her voice.

"Yes, you are a thief."

Kasumi sighed and looked at her feet, shaking her head. "How did I not see this? A thief? Did I break the law too? What kind of monster am I?"

Zaeed put his head in his left hand and groaned, "Gudamnit."

Kasumi turned and rushed up to Saren, nimbly dodging the very large guns he pointed at her. She grasped the collar of his armor and stared into his annoyed eyes. "I'm a criminal! How can I live like this?! How can I just keep going on like this now that my worldview has been so cruelly shattered?!"

His reply was cold, cruel and utterly heartless. "Not a credit more."

"HOW?!"

"Steal anything you want," Saren growled, "but I will not pay a credit more and if you don't get off my armor I'll use my CQC Flayer on you."

Kasumi skipped back, sticking her tongue out at him. "Jerk, maybe I'll steal something from _you_, like your heart."

"He has one?" Jack asked in surprise.

"I have several I keep on display to remind people not to fuck with me," Saren replied, "but I use cybernetics to circulate and oxygenate my blood, most of which is artificial. None of those cybernetics are, strictly speaking, hearts in order to avoid any single point of failure."

"So you're literally heartless?" Jack asked. "Well, aside from all of thse hearts you collected anyway."

"Yes," Saren ground out.

"Then I guess I'll have plenty of options for which to steal!" Kasumi said excitedly.

"You could also steal all of them," Alma suggested.

"I like that plan, it involves stealing 'all of them,' that's my favorite thing to steal!"

"I see you've recovered well from your little crisis," Jack remarks.

"Well, you have to be able to live with yourself and accept your flaws for what they are," Kasumi explained. "Not that stealing everything not bolted down is a _bad_ thing, but sometimes I might get carried away."

"Really? I woulda never suspected," Zaeed muttered from where he sat.

Kasumi went over and hugged him. "I know Zeezee, but I'm the stealth expert, so I'm very good at hiding things, even from myself."

"Get off me," he growled, shifting slightly, but Kasumi held, on reassuring him.

"I know these sorts of problems are hard on friends and family, but I know that if we stick together we'll get through this!"

"Can we please go kill something," Zaeed begged Saren.

"I would prefer that as well," Alma noted.

"As would I," Saren agreed.

"Wait!" Jack cried out. "There's someone else we need to get before our team is ready!"

"Who?" Saren and Kasumi asked simultaneously, causing Saren to do the Turian equivalent of a scowl as he glared at her.

"Her," Jack said, pointing behind Saren's group. Everyone turned to look, but no one in particular stood out of the crowd of mildly curious pedestrians.

Everyone turned back to him.

He shrugged. "Well, it would have been an awesome moment if she _had_ been there."

"I know, right? Perfect introduction!" Kasumi agreed.

~+~B:F/M~+~

"Hello again, Tali'Zorah," Alma said to the nervous Quarian.

"Oh, uh, hi," she replied. She turned away from her workbench overlooking an old frigate being disassembled to look at the other people on the deck. She had been somewhat hoping that the two extremely dangerous humans would leave her alone. Apparently they had decided to return with a small army.

"We wanted to hire you to help us against a pirate and a slaver," Kasumi said.

"What? How?"

"Oh please, you're the daughter of one of the Admirals of the Migrant Fleet, Meegor has only praise for your technical abilities and there's no way your father didn't make sure you had _some_ experience with combat before you left, so you're coming with us, stopping a very evil person and getting paid a lot of money!" Kasumi explained.

"We need a techie," Zaeed added.

"I don't know about this…" Tali said.

"Listen, you'll just hang back with me and help me hack things," Kasumi reassured her. "We'll only get into the thick of things when it's time to loot."

"Just because I'm a Quarian doesn't mean I can hack anything," Tali objected.

"But your technical experience suggests you can," Kasumi replied.

"And there's your Pilgrimage to look toward," Zaeed commented. "We're going to be stopping an pirate's auction of ancient artifacts and art, even if you can't use any of that, it'll give you the money you need to get something to bring back."

"Yeah, and we're working with a Specter on this, so we'll make sure you're safe," Jack assured Tali.

"It's a good deal Tali, you should take it," Meegor told her. He nodded to Zaeed and Kasumi. "I know them, and while they can be a bit reckless, I trust them as much as you can trust anyone in the Terminus."

She turns to him questioningly to which he nods encouragingly. "Okay, I'll join you, but we need to talk price first."

"Good girl," Meegor said. "You're learning fast."

Kasumi nodded. "Talking money is a good idea, so what should he pay you?" she said, gesturing to Saren.

"Excuse me? She's your Quarian," he growled in response.

"Do you need a hug?"

"I'll kill you, some day."

"Um, is it too late to change my mind?" Tali asked.

"It is," Alma replied.

"Oh…good…"

~+~B:F/M~+~

The Afterlife was Aria's club and the center of her power in Omega and the rest of the Terminus, as well as the galaxy. The club itself was large, reaching from floor to ceiling of the fifty meters of vertical space in the sector and extending above and below it. Holograms of fires and silhouettes within them danced along its walls while sculptures of abstract art with figures chained to them hovered in from of it. Dance beats thudded out through the reinforced walls of the club and hundreds gathered outside of the main entrance.

The concourse outside of the Afterlife, Aria's club and palace in Omega, was large and open with large pots and dividers which were clearly designed to serve as cover for the defenders of the club. The openness of the concourse, even with the numerous stores and the taxi service station, was too open for attackers to easily approach. This kill zone was set up so that any attackers would be vulnerable to the dozen or so turrets on the club itself, the three hundred Replicas in positions around the concourse and the surrounding sector, the hundreds of combat drones on patrols, the one hundred twenty-eight heavily armed and armored soldiers guarding the club's entrance, and the thirty-six heavy mechs that were held in reserve in the garage just under the main entrance to the Afterlife.

"How are we getting through all of that?" Tali cried out in protest.

"Shh, its okay Tali, here, look at this to take your mind off it," Kasumi said, swiping her omnitool over Tali's.

"Calm down? Why should I – wait, is-is this what I think it is?"

Kasumi gave her a vulpine grin. "Yes it is."

"…I can work with this."

"Told ya."

Their group had to pause and wait at the far end of the concourse due to the fact that Aria's enforcers wouldn't let Jack's mech anywhere near the club entrance. This was acceptable however, especially with Alma's wide area destructive abilities available. As far as Jack could tell, the only one deeply concerned with the idea of collateral damage was Tali, but presumably she'd grow out of it.

Saren and his people were continuing onwards to the club's entrance, none of the guards willing to start a fight trying to stop him. After all, even someone with his reputation for incredible levels of destruction wouldn't be crazy enough to try and take on Aria with just a handful of people, so someone as important as a Specter could be allowed to approach closer.

Saren managed to make his way through the guards and cut past the long line to enter the club and began to ascend the two hundred fifty six steps to the large doors. His retinue had spread out around him, ready for action and Aria's soldiers were tense as well.

An Elcor in powered armor with shoulder mounted cannons stomped down to meet Saren. They met in the middle of the stairs, a largely open area with soldiers in cover at the top, bottom and sides of the stairs, all of them ready to act at a moment's notice.

"Polite: Greetings Specter," the Elcor said.

"Patch me through to Aria," Saren demanded.

"Smug: She is already listening," the Elcor told him.

"What is it Saren? I don't have time for another of your paranoid rants or threats, I'm a busy woman," Aria snapped through the speakers

"Hand over the artifact, Aria," Saren demanded. "I don't make threats, only promises."

"I'm the same Saren, so here's the deal: you will either _buy_ the artifact you want, or you can fuck off, and if that's beyond your meager capabilities my people can help you with that."

"If you don't cooperate, this is it. I. WILL. KILL. YOU," Saren stated.

"Funny, I was just about to say the same," Aria replied. "I really hope you don't cooperate by the way. That way I can mail Desolas your head. I think it'd make a nice birthday present, don't you?"

"It wouldn't be as good as yours," Saren snarled as he continued scanning the surrounding area and Aria's forces.

"You're right, my head is pretty awesome, as your brother, mother, and sister already know – well in your sister's case _knew_, since she's dead," Aria replied. "Now, are you going to leave your weapons and your lackeys and enter my club, or are you going to make me and a lot of people very happy by committing suicide by Aria?"

Saren aimed his two arm-mounted LMGs and opened fire on nearby soldiers on either side, his Flayer system activated to quickly blast the Elcor into pieces, and missile pods on his shoulders fired into the soldiers and drones in the surrounding area.

"Suicide it is!" Aria cried out ecstatically. "I will skullfuck your corpse Saren!"

~+~B:F/M~+~

Alma felt the rising tension and fear in the distance as Saren approached the entrance, the crowd gradually realizing that the might not want to be near the line of fire when a fight broke out. They weren't able to get out in time. Not that their group wanted them to get away. As they'd discussed on the way to pick up Tali, Alma's aura could be very potent in turning crowds against themselves and each other. They hadn't mentioned this to Tali'Zorah for the obvious reason that she probably cared about that sort of thing.

Alma was aware of Jack's discomfort, but neither Zaeed or Kasumi were more than slightly bothered by the plan and what it entailed. Saren had encouraged it when he heard of it. In fact, his psychic would have done something similar if he wasn't under fire.

Alma reached within for her burning anger and her old fear, and then she _pushed_, the psionic energy of concourse mixing and blending with her wellspring of hatred and anger. She felt a strange energy permeating the concourse. Her power spread across the entirety of the battlefield over the course of a half minute as Saren biotically charged into a cluster of soldiers unfortunate enough to be anywhere near him and he gunned them down with extreme prejudice. Clusters of small missiles arced back and forth across the battlefield as Saren's retinue ran into and through cover in order to kill as many soldiers as they could.

Alma could feel the nervousness from Tali, the eagerness from Zaeed and the anticipation from Kasumi. She couldn't feel Jack because of the REV8's psishielding, but she knew he was there. She could also feel the fear rippling through the crowd as anger began to overcome it.

"I am ready, open fire," Alma told them. Then she pulled together more psionic strength, readying for the next step and selecting a large cluster of Replicas.

She waited several moments more as Jack stormed into the thick of the battle, opening fire with his laser cannons and sending a barrage of rockets into a piece of statuary, thoroughly destroying it.

Eventually she was ready enough so she sent out the tearing wave of psychic energy which rushed out,, breaking tile and rending apart Replicas before she drew back what psionic energy her rending wave managed to sweep up. She felt the trickle of knowledge that came from harvesting, before focusing on picking off dangerous individuals such as ones carrying heavy weapons or piloting a mech.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Saren roared behind his helmet as he blasted apart another of Aria's meant shields. As if these thugs could stop him, _him_. Nothing stopped him, especially not petty pirates playing politics.

Now, he was doing what he excelled at: killing.

He dove over a ferrocrete barrier and into a heavily armored and laser armed Replica, hitting the Replica guns first so as to empty them into the Replica as quickly as possible. By the time Saren slammed into the Replica and onto the ground, it was dead. Seeing a soldier backing towards cover as he fired an LMG in Saren's direction, he grinned. Another target.

Saren leapt towards the soldier, biotically charging and colliding with the soldier in an explosion of biotic energy. The soldier went sprawling and Saren sent a micro missile into the man's head before getting hit with a laser cannon. Reflexively, Saren biotically charged away from where he was being hit and turned to see a squadron of six large, bulky mechs with large buns trained on him.

Saren grinned and leapt towards them, releasing several fusion micromissiles into them as he laughed.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Jack was not suicidal, which was why he had been reluctant to begin this fight to begin with, but seeing the sheer chaos that they were already causing, he knew they had a chance, maybe not a big chance, but one none the less.

"Tell me its ready girls!" he called out across their team channel.

"Almost there, draw the turrets' fire or they'll kill Saren's people!" Tali responded over the comms.

"Got it!" Jack replied as he turned his mech towards the firefight at the far end of the concourse. Saren and his retinue were in the thick of the fighting, surrounded on all sides by enemies and bodies with Saren himself jumping off of a mech just as a landmine he had planted on it exploded. From the distance and the fighting, Jack couldn't tell if any of the retinue had died, but he presumed that there were probably mostly intact.

In between him and that fight a riot had broken out due to the psionic anger permeating the very air of the concourse. And unlike the riot he had seen in the Human city he had called home before the experiments, these people were all well-armed. 'Maybe starting a riot just because was a bad idea,' Jack thought to himself. 'Maybe Saren has rubbed off on me already.' He mentally shrugged. 'Well, too late now, might as well take advantage of it.'

He focused on the turrets on the Afterlife and sent laser blasts at each of them, trying to draw their attention without destroying them. This worked about as well as he could have hoped, in that they all began to focus their fire on the mech, reducing its shields in seconds and damaging the mech with the combination of ultraviolet lasers, anti-armor cannons, and missile launchers.

"Oh shit, its working! DO IT NOW!" Jack cried as damage alerts started rapidly pinging on his mech's HUD.

"Just a few seconds more!" Tali replied, agitated.

"In just a few seconds my mech and I will be dead!" Jack angrily replied as he desperately tried to get the cumbersome mech to dodge, failing all the while.

"You'll be fine, don't worry about it so much," Kasumi told him just as a cluster of missiles blew apart the REV8's right leg, causing it to topple over. She winced.

"Fuck you Kasumi!"

"Soon-to-be-dead aren't really my type," she replied to him before turning to Tali, "so we'd better save him I guess."

Tali pressed a final key on her omnitool and released her mental connection with the systems she had interfaced with. "That's what I was doing," she said as the turrets turned on Aria's forces.

Zaeed looked up from where he was using his sniper rifle to pick off Replicas and drones. "Will you stop yammering and actually contribute, Kasumi?"

She held up her hands in defeat. "Fine, fine, I'll go kill things," she said as she pulled out her two SMGs and vanished from view having activated her cloaking system.

After a moment, Tali said, "Don't look at me, I'm busy turning the station against Aria."

Zaeed grunted and went back to shooting enemies.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Five Replicas ran up behind cover to flank the three enemies at the far side of the concourse from the Afterlife. The three enemies were a sniper, a powerful offensive psion, and a technical expert. Of the three the psion was designated the highest priority, then the technical expert, and finally the sniper.

Another had been present, but had engaged stealth systems and was as yet undetected. One of the Replicas was designated overwatch to look out for the stealthed hostile while the others focused on their priority target, two ready to fire grenades and two ready to fire lasers.

Suddenly the two with grenade launchers registered something piercing their shields and armor, white hot monomolecular blades. An instant later the blades fired out of their chest plates with explosive force, shattering and sending white hot shrapnel flying.

As the remaining three turned their attention on where their comrades had died, a barrage of phased rounds rushed through the Replica on overwatch's shields as it managed to get its own shots off in the direction of the stealthed attacker. The assault rifle burst bounced off of the barriers of the attacker, revealing a humanoid form. The opponent jumped over their cover to the other side as the three remaining Replicas continued to fire on her. The wounded overwatch Replica paused when it noticed a large, round object on the ground near it and the other two Replica. It instantly identified the object as a grenade and leapt away, pinging the other two with a grenade alert and requesting assistance from nearby allies.

Unfortunately, it would not get the chance to be reinforced as the grenade went off a microsecond later, killing the Replica and severely wounding the other two. The survivors opened fire towards the other side of their cover, but their opponent had apparently shifted position. They did however attract the attention of the enemy sniper however, who took out anther of the Replica with a head shot.

The last of the Replica ducked behind cover, only to feel burning pain in its chest as the stealthed enemy stabbed in in the heart.

The last words it heard were its opponent speaking in a female voice, "Too easy."

~+~B:F/M~+~

The REV8's microfabricator and autorepair systems were amazing. Having lost most of its right leg and part of its left arm, as well as having significant chunks of its armor dangerously melted, it had still been able to restore functionality in just over three minutes. During that time, Jack had been able to use the mostly functional left arm of mech to pick off enemies while he sat sideways.

He did not particularly enjoy this, especially when someone decided to throw a canister of some incendiary onto his mech. The incendiary was powerful enough that what missed and hit the floor had somehow managed to burn holes several centimeters deep in less than a minute. On further consideration, Jack noted that if it was deep enough for him to notice, then it was actually probably more than just a few centimeters. Whoever had decided to use that in a space station was insane.

And most of it was on his mech.

"Tali! How do I get this incendiary off my mech?" Jack called out over their channel.

"…uh, well I think it's actually being held off the armor by your kinetic barriers, so just stand up now that the knee is repaired."

"Got it, thanks," Jack replied as he commanded the mech to move its arms and legs so that it was standing upright. The insane incendiary slid off of the kinetic barriers and began burning more holes into the floor. "Let's wrap this up before this stuff burns a hole into the vacuum, okay?"

"Technically there are several sections beneath us, so even if they lasted that long we've got time," Tali replied.

"Cool."

"Yeah, and I've hacked into their drone network so I can set them to attack everything, but it looks like what I pulled with the turrets won't work," she told the others.

"Why not?" Zaeed asked after shooting the head off of another Replica.

"Their security is too tight, the commands simply don't exist at this level and going down into the binaries to pull it off would take long enough for them to stop me."

Alma sent out another psionic shockwave, tearing apart an aircar and causing another to crash into a holographic display and explode. "Your proposal is acceptable," she said on the channel. "We should not waste time."

"She's right," Zaeed added. "Aria's got thousands of people on this station, so even if something's happening elsewhere we'll get swamped if we wait too gud damn long."

"Okay, done," Tali said as the air and ground drones suddenly started treating the Replicas and each other as hostiles. While the volume of fire directed towards their and Saren's teams decreased, the overall volume of fire increased as desperate fights for survival sprang up practically everywhere. One Krogan Replica even went into a blood rage and started crushing the skulls of its Human Replica compatriots.

"Then let's go kill things, all this talking is starting to get boring," Kasumi said as she rushed into a firefight between enraged residents, Replicas, and hacked drones, firing indiscriminately while stealthed.

"She's the stealth expert?" Jack asked in clarification.

"No one can see you if they are all dead," Alma explained.

"Flawless logic," Jack replied.

"Yeah…" Tali said, not quite agreeing.

Jack piloted his REV8 across the concourse, sending out missile barrages into any Replicas drones or hostile Omega residents he saw. Unfortunately the mech was running low on mass for repairs and missiles so he focused on making slow progress so that he could use lasers to focus down enemies while providing modile cover for Zaeed, Alma and Tali, who had taken out a shotgun and was using to fire wildly into the barriers, displays and stalls which lined the edges of the concourse. This was a reasonable action as occasionally a Replica or dron would come out of cover there and fire on them, before getting put down by either Zaeed, Alma or Kasumi.

While under other circumstances the Replicas and soldiers would have quickly dealt with the rogue drones, the fire support of the turrets combined with Saren's sheer 'murderization,' meant that they couldn't mount an effective and organized defense, resulting in most withdrawing into the garages by the time Jack and the others reached the stairs to the main entrance. To the side of the stairs on top of a mound of charred and ventilated corpses was Saren, his formerly bone white armor now colored with various shades of blood from across the galaxy.

"Took you long enough," Saren sneered. "I ran out of survivors a minute ago."

"Sorry about that," Jack said through the mech's speakers, "we'll try to keep up better in the future."

Saren dismissively turned towards the main doors of the Afterlife, large thick blast doors designed to withstand most anti-armor weapons wide enough for well over two dozen Elcor to walk in side by side. "Now that we've seen to the statuary, it's time to knock on Aria's door."

"Front door or back door?" Kasumi asked.

Saren snapped out with one arm and fired a burst at her location on their collective virtual map of the battlefield. It passed through her supposed location and impacted the ground. "Haha! Missed me again!"

Saren growled and turned to Tali. "Can you open the door or do you need to lead us through the garages?"

Tali gulped. "I think I can manage."

"Good."

~+~B:F/M~+~

The first team of Blue Suns mercenaries arrived halfway through the battle and seeing the sheer chaos and carnage, decided that perhaps waiting like they had been ordered was the wiser course of action.

After all, playing with weaker prey was much funner.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Aeni staggered through the streets of Residential Sector 31 muttering to herself and clutching something in her hands. Loeru, her friend and fellow Asari, walked over to her as the crowd maintained a slight distance with the obviously unstable Asari.

"Aeni, what's wrong?" Loeru asked as she stepped next to her friend and she finally made out what Aeni was saying.

"Make us whole, make us whole, make us whole, make us wh–"

Loeru, worried that her friend was having a bad trip, put her hand on her friend's shoulder and shook it slightly while saying "Aeni, its me Loeru, are you okay?"

Aeni stopped muttering and looked into Loeru's eyes and held up what she was holding, a detonator. "MAKE US WHOLE!"

Loeru barely had time to react before the bomb went off, spreading death and paving the way.

~+~B:F/M~+~

A/N: Saren is the best role model, and if you hadn't gathered Aria and Saren know and deeply respect each other. ;)

Also, FOOF is a wonderful thing, and Future!Super!FOOF is even better.

Below is a list of Alma and Jack's powers as they stand right now, please be aware that this might change later.

Alma's psionic powers:

1. Soul Eater: She can quickly and efficiently consume the psionic essence of a target for a permanent increase of her psionic strength. This doesn't mean she can't exhaust herself while using it, just that when she recovers afterwards she'll be stronger than before.

2. Offensive Macro-Telekinesis: She is very good at inflicting abrupt forces on objects and people, however she isn't as good at smaller scale or more delicate uses of Telekinesis.

3. Moderate Aura: Her psionic aura has grown in strength that she is able to force emotions upon others consciously with concentration and unconsciously in elevated emotional states. In extreme negative emotional states or with concentration she can also manifest spirits and demons within her aura, though this does not mean she has control over them. Her Moderate Aura also comes with increased fidelity and range for her psionic senses of the physical and psychic.

4. Moderate Psionic Regeneration: Due to the sheer number of souls/minds she has consumed, her physical form's relevance and vulnerability has decreased to the point that she is able to passively and actively regenerate wounds to herself and with concentration can effect minor gradual changes to her physical appearance. She cannot change or remove her aura's physical and visible manifestations, such as glowing eyes, however.

5. Riptide: A combination of Soul Eater and Offensive Macro-Telekinesis, she can now send out a destructive wave of psionic energy which tears apart anything within the area of effect and then draws psionic energy from the area back to her in proportion to her psionic power.

6. Psionic Force Field: Using her psionic power, she can create and maintain a force field to block attacks. Its durability and toughness are dependent upon her psionic power and concentration.

Jack's psionic powers:

1. Mind Eater: He can consume the psionic essence of a target, granting a permanent increase to his psionic strength. It requires exclusive concentration on the target or the target dies before the maximum possible essence is drained.

2. Micro-Telekinesis: His telekinesis has a focus on finesse and delicate operations and he has difficulty with larger, more powerful attacks or actions.

3. Minor Aura: His aura is enough to allow him to sense nearby objects and with concentration he can affect minor influence over the emotional state of others with in aura.

4. Minor Psionic Regeneration: His psionic power can over long periods effect enhanced healing, allowing for the gradual recovery from otherwise crippling or mortal injuries. This however does not prevent death, merely enhance and supplement the body's natural healing. This leads to an increase in his stamina.

5. Disinterest Field: Using his aura, he is able to focus attention away from himself. This does not mean he isn't noticed or that people will not act against the effect merely that it is less likely.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Also, I was debating another idea for a story so I'll put this to you, the readers. Which of the below story ideas do you find the most interesting to pursue? I might do a two or more at once, but one of those would be one of the Worm choices.

1. "Dresden Files: NUDIST BLEACH" Dresden Files/Kill la Kill: Harry Dresden and his adopted daughter Ryuko Matoi have just saved his daughter by blood Maggie, but apparently they won't have time to rest as Ryuko's biological father calls her to Japan for something of world ending importance…

2. "A Game of Souls" A Song of Ice and Fire/Diablo: Rumor has it that evil infested Riverrun shortly before it was seized by Jamie Lannister in the War of the Five Kings, as darkness spread across the land heroes from across the world gather, but will it be enough to stop what is coming?

3. "Row, Row, Fight the Power!" Worm/DC(/ TTGL): Sophia Hess had always wanted to be strong in order to protect herself and her sister, when she was triggered she got he chance to be something more, something greater. She was given the power to draw energy from Life itself, pure emotional energy, and the power of raw will. As she would say: "So long as the fire of my determination for justice burns in my heart, I CANNOT LOSE!"

For clarification, this would be the story of a Shonnen Rainbow Lantern Sophia Hess.

4. "Homecoming" Elder Scrolls: Skyrim/Worm: Have you ever wondered where the Dragonborn, or any of the Dragonbreakers come from, where they once called home? This is the story of one of those fated few finding their way back home, and how it is changed by having a resident PC Dragonborn. Looting and game logic are of course mandatory (at least for our main character).

5. "Hebert Files: BAD BAY" Worm/Dresden Files: Taylor Hebert learned she is a Wizard and has set to make herself the best wizard she can be by following the example of one of the world's most (in)famous wizards, Warden Harry Dresden, Hero of Chicago and Wizard for Hire. Throughout her tirals and tribulations she asks one simple question: "What would Harry Dresden do?"

6. "White Knight" Smallville/DC/Worm: After a disaster in Kansas, the Kent family moves to Brockton Bay to live with their relatives Kurt and Lacey, and someone destined to be a superhero meets someone who desperately wants to become one.

Of course, for those who think that some of these might be completely serious, note that there will of course be both at least semi-serious moments and shenaniganry aplenty.

~+~B:F/M~+~


	11. Chapter 2-3 V2: Spoiling For a Fight

_**Author's Note: **_**I've decided to rewrite chapter 2.3, but am leaving the previous version so that you, the readers can compare them and tell me what you think of the difference. Thank you for reading.** **Replies to Reviews:** **GrimKid98: **Well, the Reapers have never wanted to kill _all_ life, have they? And if you get down to it, the Brethren Moons and the Flood don't either since they are living. They just want remove extraneous elements from the galactic/intergalactic biosphere.

Yes they are effective and morally questionable, but I don't think many of the parties involved are particularly concerned with that.

_**Chapter 2.3 Version 2: Spoilin' For a Fight**_

Jack looked at the REV8 in the freighter. It had repaired all of the damage it had accrued in the escape while they had traveled to Omega. With its microfabricator, he had been able to supply it with scrap from the cargo holds of the freighter while they were in transit. It was as ready as it could be.

He checked the pistol at his belt and the assault rifle that Zaeed had given him. "Well, let's get this show on the road."

"Yeah, Zaeed gets grumpy when he hasn't killed anyone recently, and I'm pretty sure Saren and Alma get like that too," Kasumi replied.

"I don't get grumpy," Alma said from where she was practicing using her psionic force field in combination with her new shield belt while at the same time holding onto her Teddy Bear.

"Don't encourage her," Saren ordered, standing with his retinue and robots.

"Aye, it only makes her worse," Zaeed said from where he was checking his laser rifle, assault rifle and grenade launcher.

"I'm not that bad!" Kasumi objected, twirling a goblet from the Turanic restaurant in her left hand as she held her pistol in her other, practicing her aim on a crate on the other side of the cargo bay.

"From what I've seen so far? Yes you are," Jack told her. "But you shouldn't let that hold you back, embrace it."

She turned to him and grinned. "Finally someone who understands! I knew you'd be great addition."

"They've yet to prove they can fight," Zaeed told her.

Kasumi sighed and looked at him, shaking her head. "Didn't they escape from an Armacham prison, killig their way out?"

Zaeed shrugged. "There are plenty of ways for something like that to happen, it doesn't tell us how useful they'll be," he sighed, "But I've already harped on this and he's got a REV8."

Jack nodded. "Damn right I've got a REV8. Just keep Alma safe and we'll clear out these bastards."

Alma spoke up then, frowning. "If we want to crash the auction, then we need to make sure that there is as little warning of our attack as possible."

"Yes, we wouldn't want all of the good stuff slipping away," Kasumi mused. "Thoughts?"

"We'll want to attack the auction as quickly as possible," Jack said.

"Getting through her defenses fast is our problem though," Zaeed said. "We can't just sneak in your powered armor."

Jack glared at the grizzled veteran for a moment. "My _mech_ can break through enemies fast."

Kasumi leaned back on her heels and hummed in thought as Zaeed replied, "But can it cut through them fast enough to reach the auction before any merchandise escapes? No it can't. Aria's club is a fortress."

"A technical expert could assist us by subverting her security measures," Alma suggested. "I personally have only limited skill in that for now, but it would be simple to solve this problem."

One of Saren's people spoke up then, "It would mean turning your focus away from using your powers. We have hacking specialists and two additional teams that will be moving into position to attack other entrances." Jack could feel his powerful aura and knew that this Turian was Saren's psychic.

"I'm good enough, but having someone hang back to focus on support would be good for our team to have," Kasumi said. "Even with your capabilities, we should pursue every advantage we can manage to get our hands on before we start the mission."

"We have contacts, but none of them would be able to help us against Aria this quickly or cheaply enough to make it worth hiring them," Zaeed replied. "They're too gud damn afraid of that woman."

Saren spoke up then, "It isn't a significant loss if some of the items at the auction escape, I'm only after one."

"But _we_ want them, and having more competent help will make this go smoother," Kasumi replied. She looked at her three team mates. "I think Meegor might be able to help us out with this, there might be someone he could put us in contact with on short notice."

"There is a technical expert who caught our attention and who works for Meegor," Alma informed Kasumi.

"Really?" Kasumi asked as Zaeed grunted. "Well, I suppose an interview couldn't hurt."

~+~B:F/M~+~

"Hello again, Tali'Zorah," Alma said to the nervous Quarian.

"Oh, uh, hi," she replied. She turned away from her workbench overlooking an old frigate being disassembled to look at the other people on the deck. She had been somewhat hoping that the two extremely dangerous humans would leave her alone. Apparently they had decided to return with a small army.

"We wanted to hire you to help us against a pirate and a slaver," Kasumi said.

"What? How?"

"Oh please, you're the daughter of one of the Admirals of the Migrant Fleet, Meegor has only praise for your technical abilities and there's no way your father didn't make sure you had _some_ experience with combat before you left, so you're coming with us, stopping a very evil person and getting paid a lot of money!" Kasumi explained.

"We need a techie," Jack added.

"I don't know about this…" Tali said.

"Listen, you'll just hang back with Alma and Zaeed and help me hack things," Kasumi reassured her. "You three will only get into the thick of things when it's time to loot."

Alma tilted her head to the side and shifted her grip on her Teddy Bear. "We believe that you would be a valued addition to our team, even if it is only on a temporary basis."

"Just because I'm a Quarian doesn't mean I can hack anything," Tali objected.

"But your technical experience suggests you can," Kasumi replied.

"And there's your Pilgrimage to look toward," Zaeed commented. "We're going to be stopping an pirate's auction of ancient artifacts and art, even if you can't use any of that, it'll give you the money you need to get something to bring back."

"Yeah, and we're working with a Specter on this, so we'll make sure you're safe," Jack assured Tali.

"It's a good deal Tali, you should take it," Meegor told her. He nodded to Zaeed and Kasumi. "I know them, and while they can be a bit reckless, I trust them as much as you can trust anyone in the Terminus."

She turned to him questioningly and he nodded encouragingly. "Okay, I'll join you, but we need to talk price first."

"Good girl," Meegor said. "You're learning fast."

Kasumi nodded. "Talking money is a good idea, so what should he pay you?" she said, gesturing to Saren.

"She's your Quarian," he growled in response.

"Do you want our help?" Kasumi asked. "Because we can always knock over the Armacham offices or something and let you crash the auction on your own."

"She would be a potentially useful addition," the Turian psion said, condescension clear in his voice, "but it remains to be seen if she can actually contribute anything or if this _girl_ will simply get in the way."

"I won't just get in the way!" Tali, annoyed at his attitude, protestedas she accessed her omnitool. The Turian's barriers flicked for a moment, before returning to invisibility. "I don't like violence much, but this is a military grade omnitool and I have the training to use it, so you will pay me, and pay me well."

"If you want good pay, you'll have to earn it," Saren told her.

~+~B:F/M~+~

The Afterlife was Aria's club and the center of her power in Omega and the rest of the Terminus, as well as the galaxy. The club itself was large, reaching from floor to ceiling of the fifty meters of vertical space in the sector and extending above and below it. Holograms of fires and silhouettes within them danced along its walls while sculptures of abstract art with figures chained to them hovered in from of it. Dance beats thudded out through the reinforced walls of the club and hundreds gathered outside of the main entrance.

The concourse outside of the Afterlife, Aria's club and palace in Omega, was large and open with large pots and dividers which were clearly designed to serve as cover for the defenders of the club. The openness of the concourse, even with the numerous stores and the taxi service station, was too open for attackers to easily approach. This kill zone was set up so that any attackers would be vulnerable to the dozen or so turrets on the club itself, the three hundred Replicas in positions around the concourse and the surrounding sector, the hundreds of combat drones on patrols, the one hundred twenty-eight heavily armed and armored soldiers guarding the club's entrance, and the thirty-six heavy mechs that were held in reserve in the garage just under the main entrance to the Afterlife.

"How are we getting through all of that?" Tali cried out in protest.

"Shh, its okay Tali, here, look at this to take your mind off it," Kasumi said, swiping her omnitool over Tali's.

"Calm down? Why should I – wait, is-is this what I think it is?"

Kasumi gave her a vulpine grin. "Yes it is."

"…I can work with this."

"Told ya."

Their group had to pause and wait at the far end of the concourse due to the fact that Aria's enforcers wouldn't let Jack's mech anywhere near the club entrance and were eyeing it suspiciously. This was acceptable however, especially with Alma's wide area destructive abilities available. As far as Jack could tell, the only one deeply concerned with the idea of collateral damage was Tali, but presumably she'd grow out of it.

Saren and his people were continuing onwards to the club's entrance, none of the guards willing to start a fight trying to stop him. After all, even someone with his reputation for incredible levels of destruction wouldn't be crazy enough to try and take on Aria with just a handful of people, so someone as important as a Specter could be allowed to approach closer. Saren's other two teams had moved in stealth to their starting positions already and were waiting to strike at a side entrance and the airway into the garage for hover cars entering from the sections below.

Saren managed to make his way through the guards and cut past the long line to enter the club and began to ascend the two hundred fifty six steps to the large doors. His retinue had spread out away from him, ready for action and Aria's soldiers were tense as well.

An Elcor in powered armor with shoulder mounted cannons stomped down to meet Saren. They met in the middle of the stairs, a largely open area with soldiers in cover at the top, bottom and sides of the stairs, all of them ready to act at a moment's notice.

"Polite: Greetings Specter," the Elcor said.

"Patch me through to Aria," Saren demanded.

"Smug: She is already listening," the Elcor told him.

"What is it Saren? I don't have time for another of your paranoid rants or threats, I'm a busy woman," Aria snapped through the speakers

"Hand over the artifact, Aria," Saren demanded. "I don't make threats, only promises."

"I'm the same Saren, so here's the deal: you will either _buy _the artifact you want, or you can fuck off, and if that's beyond your meager capabilities, then my people can help you with that."

"It was stolen and you know the penalty for possessing a psionic artifact stolen from the Citadel," Saren stated. "If you don't cooperate, this is it, there will be no more hiding behind blackmailed councilors or bribed officials or other proxies. You have caused trouble for too long; this is your last chance."

"Funny, I was just about to say the same," Aria replied. "I really hope you don't cooperate by the way. That way I can mail Desolas your head. I think it'd make a nice birthday present, don't you?"

"It wouldn't be as good as yours," Saren snarled as he continued scanning the surrounding area and Aria's forces.

"You're right, my head is pretty awesome, as your brother, mother, and sister already know – well in your sister's case _knew_, since she's dead," Aria replied. "Now, are you going to leave your weapons and your lackeys and enter my club, or are you going to make me and a lot of people very happy by committing suicide by Aria?"

Saren aimed his two arm-mounted LMGs and opened fire on nearby soldiers on either side, his Flayer system activated to quickly blast the Elcor into pieces, and missile pods on his shoulders fired into the soldiers and drones in the surrounding area.

"Suicide it is!" Aria cried out ecstatically. "I will skullfuck your corpse Saren!"

~+~B:F/M~+~

Alma felt the rising tension and fear in the distance as Saren approached the entrance, the crowd gradually realizing that they might not want to be near the line of fire when a fight broke out. They weren't able to get out in time. Not that their group wanted them to get away. As they'd discussed on the way to pick up Tali, Alma's aura could be very potent in turning crowds against themselves and each other. They hadn't mentioned this to Tali'Zorah for the obvious reason that she probably cared about that sort of thing.

Alma was aware of Jack's discomfort, but neither Zaeed or Kasumi were more than slightly bothered by the plan and what it entailed. Saren had encouraged it when he heard of it. In fact, his psychic would have done something similar if he wasn't under fire.

Alma reached within for her burning anger and her old fear, and then she _pushed_, the psionic energy of concourse mixing and blending with her wellspring of hatred and anger. As she did this she felt a strange energy permeating the concourse. Her power spread across the entirety of the battlefield over the course of a half minute as Saren biotically charged into a cluster of soldiers unfortunate enough to be anywhere near him and he gunned them down quickly. Clusters of small missiles arced back and forth across the battlefield as Saren's retinue ran into and through cover in order to kill as many soldiers as they could.

Alma could feel the nervousness from Tali, the determination from Zaeed and the anticipation from Kasumi. She couldn't feel Jack because of the REV8's psionic shielding, but she knew he was there. She could also feel the fear rippling through the crowd as anger began to overcome it.

"I am ready, open fire," Alma told them. Then she pulled together more psionic strength, readying for the next step and selecting a large cluster of Replicas.

She waited several moments more as Jack stormed into the thick of the battle, opening fire with his laser cannons and sending a barrage of rockets into a piece of statuary, thoroughly destroying it.

Eventually she was ready enough so she sent out the tearing wave of psychic energy which rushed out,, breaking tile and rending apart Replicas before she drew back what psionic energy her rending wave managed to sweep up. She felt the trickle of knowledge that came from harvesting, before focusing on picking off dangerous individuals such as ones carrying heavy weapons or piloting a mech.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Saren roared behind his helmet as he blasted apart another of Aria's meant shields. As if these thugs could stop him, _him_. Nothing stopped him, especially not petty pirates playing politics.

Now, he was doing what he excelled at: killing.

He dove over a ferrocrete barrier and into a heavily armored and laser armed Replica, hitting the Replica guns first so as to fire them into the Replica as quickly as possible. By the time Saren slammed into the Replica and onto the ground, it was dead. Seeing a soldier backing towards cover as he fired an LMG in Saren's direction, he grinned. Another target.

Saren leapt towards the soldier, biotically charging and colliding with the soldier in an explosion of biotic energy. The soldier went sprawling and Saren sent a micro missile into the man's head before getting hit with a laser cannon. Reflexively, Saren biotically charged away from where he was being hit and turned to see a squadron of six large, bulky mechs with large guns trained on him.

Saren grinned and leapt towards them, releasing several fusion micromissiles into them as he laughed.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Jack was not suicidal, which was why he had been reluctant to begin this fight to begin with, but seeing the sheer chaos that they were already causing, he knew they had a chance, maybe not a big chance, but one none the less.

"Tell me its ready girls!" he called out across their team channel.

"Almost there, draw the turrets' fire or they'll kill Saren's people!" Tali responded over the comms.

"Got it!" Jack replied as he turned his mech towards the firefight at the far end of the concourse. Saren and his retinue were in the thick of the fighting, surrounded on all sides by enemies and bodies with Saren himself jumping off of a mech just as a landmine he had planted on it exploded. From the distance and the fighting, Jack couldn't tell if any of the retinue had died, but he presumed that there were probably mostly intact.

In between him and that fight a riot had broken out due to the psionic anger permeating the very air of the concourse. And unlike the riot he had seen in the Human city he had called home before the experiments, these people were all well-armed. 'Alma shouldn't have brought up the idea,' Jack thought to himself. 'Kasumi and Saren don't seem like they'll be a good influence on her.' He mentally shrugged. 'Well, too late now, I should focus on the task at hand.'

He focused on the turrets on the Afterlife and sent laser blasts at each of them, trying to draw their attention without destroying them. This worked about as well as he could have hoped, in that they all began to focus their fire on the mech, reducing its shields in seconds and damaging the mech with the combination of ultraviolet lasers, anti-armor cannons, and missile launchers.

"Oh shit, its working! DO IT NOW!" Jack cried as damage alerts started rapidly pinging on his mech's HUD.

"Just a few seconds more!" Tali replied, agitated.

"In just a few seconds my mech and I will be dead!" Jack angrily replied as he desperately tried to get the cumbersome mech to dodge, failing all the while.

"You'll be fine, don't worry about it so much," Kasumi told him just as a cluster of missiles blew apart the REV8's right leg, causing it to topple over. She winced.

"Fuck you Kasumi!"

"Soon-to-be-dead aren't really my type," she replied to him, still working away at her omnitool, before turning to Tali, "so we'd better save him I guess."

Tali pressed a final key on her omnitool and released her mental connection with the systems she had interfaced with. "That's what I was doing," she said as the turrets turned on Aria's forces.

Zaeed looked up from where he was using his sniper rifle to pick off Replicas and drones. "Will you stop yammering and actually contribute, Kasumi?"

She snapped a quick glare at him before looking back at her omnitool. "I helping Tali, and messing with the club's internal systems," she said before looking up from her omnitool. "Done, that'll delay them. Now let's go kill things," she said as she pulled out her two SMGs and vanished from view having activated her cloaking system.

After a moment, Tali said, "Don't look at me, I'm busy turning the station against Aria."

Zaeed grunted and went back to shooting enemies.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Five Replicas ran up behind cover to flank the three enemies at the far side of the concourse from the Afterlife. The three enemies were a sniper, a powerful offensive psion, and a technical expert. Of the three the psion was designated the highest priority, then the technical expert, and finally the sniper.

Another had been present, but had engaged stealth systems and was as yet undetected. One of the Replicas was designated overwatch to look out for the stealthed hostile while the others focused on their priority target, two ready to fire grenades and two ready to fire lasers.

Suddenly the two with grenade launchers registered something piercing their shields and armor, white hot monomolecular blades. An instant later the blades fired out of their chest plates with explosive force, shattering and sending white hot shrapnel flying.

As the remaining three turned their attention on where their comrades had died, a barrage of phased rounds rushed through the Replica on overwatch's shields as it managed to get its own shots off in the direction of the stealthed attacker. The assault rifle burst bounced off of the barriers of the attacker, revealing a humanoid form. The opponent jumped over their cover to the other side as the three remaining Replicas continued to fire on her. The wounded overwatch Replica paused when it noticed a large, round object on the ground near it and the other two Replica. It instantly identified the object as a grenade and leapt away, pinging the other two with a grenade alert and requesting assistance from nearby allies.

Unfortunately, it would not get the chance to be reinforced as the grenade went off a microsecond later, killing the Replica and severely wounding the other two. The survivors opened fire towards the other side of their cover, but their opponent had apparently shifted position. They did however attract the attention of the enemy sniper however, who took out anther of the Replica with a head shot.

The last of the Replica ducked behind cover, only to feel burning pain in its chest as the stealthed enemy stabbed in in the heart.

The last words it heard were its opponent speaking in a female voice, "Too easy."

~+~B:F/M~+~

The REV8's microfabricator and autorepair systems were amazing. Having lost most of its right leg and part of its left arm, as well as having significant chunks of its armor dangerously melted, it had still been able to restore functionality in just over three minutes. During that time, Jack had been able to use the mostly functional left arm of mech to pick off enemies while he sat sideways.

He did not particularly enjoy this, especially when someone decided to throw a canister of some incendiary onto his mech. The incendiary was powerful enough that what missed and hit the floor had somehow managed to burn holes several centimeters deep in less than a minute. On further consideration, Jack noted that if it was deep enough for him to notice, then it was actually probably more than just a few centimeters. Whoever had decided to use that in a space station was insane just for having it at all.

And most of it was on his mech.

"Tali! How do I get this incendiary off my mech?" Jack called out over their channel.

"…uh, well I think it's actually being held off the armor by your kinetic barriers, so just stand up now that the knee is repaired. But it'll probably burn itself out eventually; the fire is a chemical reaction after all."

"Got it, thanks," Jack replied as he commanded the mech to move its arms and legs so that it was standing upright. The insane incendiary slid off of the kinetic barriers and began burning more holes into the floor. "Let's wrap this up before this stuff burns a hole into the vacuum, okay?"

"Technically there are several sections beneath us, so even if they lasted that long we've got time," Tali replied.

"Cool."

"Yeah, and I've hacked into their drone network so I can set them to attack everything, but it looks like what I pulled with the turrets won't work," she told the others.

"Why not?" Zaeed asked after shooting the head off of another Replica.

"Their security is too tight, the commands simply don't exist at this level and going down into the binaries to pull it off would take long enough for them to stop me."

Alma sent out another psionic shockwave, tearing apart an aircar and causing another to crash into a holographic display and explode. "Your proposal is acceptable," she said on the channel. "We should not waste time."

"She's right," Zaeed added. "Aria's got thousands of people on this station, so even if something's happening elsewhere we'll get swamped if we wait too gud damn long."

"Okay, done," Tali said as the air and ground drones suddenly started treating the Replicas and each other as hostiles. While the volume of fire directed towards their and Saren's teams decreased, the overall volume of fire increased as desperate fights for survival sprang up practically everywhere. One Krogan Replica even went into a blood rage and started crushing the skulls of its Human Replica compatriots.

"We need to keep moving, I can practically hear the loot escaping," Kasumi said as she rushed while stealthed into a firefight between enraged residents, Replicas, and hacked drones, firing bursts into the most dangerous opponents first.

"She's the stealth expert?" Jack asked in clarification.

"She can handle herself in fight," Zaeed explained. "And it's easier to kill someone if they don't see you coming."

"Well, I guess that makes sense," Jack replied.

"Yeah…" Tali said, not quite agreeing.

Jack piloted his REV8 across the concourse, sending out missile barrages into any large clusters of Replicas, drones or hostile Omega residents he saw. Unfortunately the mech was running low on mass for repairs and missiles so he focused on making slow progress so that he could use lasers to focus down enemies while providing modile cover for Zaeed, Alma and Tali, who had taken out a shotgun and was using to fire wildly into the barriers, displays and stalls which lined the edges of the concourse. This was a reasonable action as occasionally a Replica or drone would come out of cover there and fire on them, before getting put down by either Zaeed, Alma or Kasumi. Tali herself also made a respectable showing against their enemies as well, taking down one drone that Jack saw and likely more.

While under other circumstances the Replicas and soldiers would have quickly dealt with the rogue drones, the fire support of the turrets combined with the sheer ferocity of Saren and his people meant that they couldn't mount an effective and organized defense, resulting in most withdrawing into the garages by the time Jack and the others reached the stairs to the main entrance. Unfortunately for them, they were simply running into another kill zone as that was the entry point for the second of Saren's teams. To the side of the stairs on top of a mound of charred and ventilated corpses was Saren, his formerly bone white armor now colored with various shades of blood from across the galaxy where it wasn't scorched by laser fire.

"Took you long enough," Saren said, annoyed.

"Sorry about that," Jack said through the mech's speakers, "we'll try to keep up better in the future."

Saren dismissively turned towards the main doors of the Afterlife, large thick blast doors designed to withstand most anti-armor weapons wide enough for well over two dozen Elcor to walk in side by side. "Now that we've seen to the statuary, it's time to knock on Aria's door. I already have people working on manually accessing the systems over there." He pointed to where three Turians were prying pieces of the wall off next to the main doors.

"Do you think you can open the door from your omni?" Kasumi asked Tali. "We need to make this fast."

Tali gulped. "I think I can manage, I should know in a minute."

"Good," Saren said as he turned to survey the concourse.

~+~B:F/M~+~

The first team of Blue Suns mercenaries arrived halfway through the battle and seeing the sheer chaos and carnage, decided that perhaps waiting like they had been ordered was the wiser course of action.

After all, playing with weaker prey was much more fun.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Aeni staggered through the streets of Residential Sector 31 muttering to herself and clutching something in her hands. Loeru, her friend and fellow Asari, walked over to her as the crowd maintained a slight distance with the obviously unstable Asari.

"Aeni, what's wrong?" Loeru asked as she stepped next to her friend and she finally made out what Aeni was saying.

"Make us whole, make us whole, make us whole, make us wh–"

Loeru, worried that her friend was having a bad trip, put her hand on her friend's shoulder and shook it slightly while saying "Aeni, its me Loeru, are you okay?"

Aeni stopped muttering and looked into Loeru's eyes and held up what she was holding, a detonator. "MAKE US WHOLE!"

Loeru barely had time to react before the bomb went off, spreading death and paving the way.

~+~B:F/M~+~

A/N: So I've rewritten the dialogue and some scenes. I hope you like this chapter.

~+~B:F/M~+~


	12. Chapter 2-4: Highway to Hell

_**Chapter 2.4: Highway to Hell**_

Saren paced back and forth in front of the massive doors that barred entry to the club. Over a minute had passed since Tali had started and while that was not a long time, they could not afford to wait. He turned to focus on the human psion Alma, who was studying her own omnitool. She was an extremely dangerous human, according to his sources, and a useful tool.

"Alma, can you open this quickly?" he asked.

Alma frowned for several precious seconds and nodded before turning her glowing amber eyes on Saren. "Yes, but I will need more psionic energy in order to avoid burnout."

Saren himself frowned. "Where can you get more quickly?" He had heard about those rare few psions who developed the ability to drain the minds, or as the more superstitious claimed, souls, of others to increase their own strength, however they typically all required close proximity to their target and there wasn't anyone he was willing to sacrifice at the moment to fuel her.

"I can reach some of the people still down in the concourse," Alma replied.

Most of them were a close to civilian as it came in Omega, though at this point there was a full blown riot going on as people were driven into rages by Alma's still-present aura.

Of course, at this point her minder interrupted from within his REV8 powered armor. "Listen, maybe we shouldn't be killing people just to make things go faster. That kind of thing makes enemies. And it might be wrong. If that matters."

Alma turned to him. "If we make enemies, then we will kill them as well."

Saren agreed, "She's right, with my support any enemies you make today will be no threat. Additionally, there's no reason for anyone here to feel guilty about this, they're all scum. They waste their lives on drugs, they wouldn't hesitate if our positions were reversed, and they are the kinds of people who sold children to Armacham and would do so again without hesitation."

Saren heard the human Jack sigh over the comms. "How long will the door take?"

"It looks like they've destroyed the door mechanisms and manually disconnected the interior network from the outside," Tali replied shakily as she hurriedly looked for some solution. "We can still get in through the garage if we meet up with the other team…"

Zaeed grunted. "We've wasted too much time. We need to keep up the pressure."

Kasumi nodded. "Time is not on our side, it's on Aria's and her army's. Do it Alma."

Alma glanced at Jack again, and when he didn't say anything she turned to focus on the remains of the Omega crowd about a hundred meters away. Saren watched closely as the rage consumed crowd continued to fight itself, the spirits that manifested due to her power, and the slowly trickling in soldiers of Aria. Saren noted that some of the spirits were demons, and chided himself for not noticing that earlier. It was somewhat worrying that she would be able to unconsciously manifest beings of such innate anger and malevolence, but unsurprising given her history. Her anger was palpable even though her aura was mostly spread out in the concourse below. He was slightly surprised at the sheer number of demons that were currently in the concourse, and the fact that it was still slowly growing. A psionic aura capable of sustaining more than a handful of weak spirits was rare, though it made sense given her estimated kill count in the reports he'd seen. He supposed that he was lucky that she had such poor control over her power. Otherwise she might actually be able to direct or control the monsters, and maybe even manifest a greater demon like Hell Knight.

It took just over two seconds for Alma to start 'feeding' on the crowd. On by one their heads started exploding, which quickly drew notice, subtly though it was. Some decided to focus their fire towards Saren and his team, while the more intelligent chose to flee while they had the chance. Saren chose to stand there for the next minute while Alma methodically drained anyone who tried to attack them or was nearby.

When she was done the concourse was empty of life for slightly over a hundred feet around the group, though fighting continued at the far end and the various side entrances.

Alma turned to the door and focused as her eyes slowly shifted from burning crimson to glowing amber.

Saren could feel the power building around the human child without any psionic ability, and he could even see the air around her warp. The power coiled around her and the ceramic plating of the floor cracked as the distortions in the air grew.

And then she unleashed the built up power into the door.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Aria had not been the one to commission the blast doors for the Afterlife. That honor went to the Patriarch, who had built for himself a citadel within his stronghold that was the Omega station. The doors were thick enough to serve as ship-borne armor because it was supposed to serve as protection against enemy vessels back when Omega itself was only just starting to become a major trade hub. All in all, it was many thousands of kilograms several meters thick. While Aria had changed the Patriarch's Citadel significantly over the centuries after her acquisition of it and the city, the blast doors themselves had not been significantly altered. Beyond the doors was a set of large airlocks for added security, though Aria usually left them open. Beyond the airlocks was the rest of the entryway, once a kill zone for attacking invades, it was now an open hallway overlooked by balconies so that club-goers could hang out and watch newcomers from above.

Soldiers, Replicas and drones had taken up positions in the balconies while turrets had unfolded from the walls and ceiling. More Replicas and drones set up barriers and cover on the floor of the hallway itself to hold their opponents in place while their allies poured fire into them from above.

This strategy was subpar in handling the blast doors exploding through the airlocks and smashing first into the balconies on each side and then into the barriers and defenders on the floor.

Modern technology was not prone to catching fire, but in the circumstances they tried their best to.

While the soldiers and Replicas recovered from the massive psionic attack, the turrets in ceiling and the ones surviving on the walls of the entryway opened fire into the cloud of dust and debris which floated in the air over the remains of the entrance to the Afterlife.

Missiles streaked out of the clouds as a bone white figure with glowing blue line upon it burst out and biotically charged up onto one of the still-standing balconies. It then sent out a wave of biotic force to knock the nearby Replicas off their feet as it fired its two large weapons from each hand, each of the guns easily as big as the figure. It proceeded to gun down every Replica and drone nearby before proceeding into the corridor that the balcony was connected too.

On the entryway's floor, a squad of Replica moved forward behind cover. Their goal was to secure a position behind one of the fallen blast doors so that they could suppress further enemy advances. They were currently behind one of the wide deployable floor panels that had risen when the alarms had gone off. The Replica selected to go first checked the battlefield display in order to confirm that there were no hostiles ready to open fire and then bust from cover, running to the door ten meters away. It slid into place and crouched behind the mangled pieces of cover.

The three Replicas on overwatch identified three Turians and a human moving out of the cloud and into cover behind wreckage. The three Replicas provided suppressing fire while the others moved up. By the time the hostiles started returning fire the rest of the survivors in the entryway had taken positons and began to open up.

And then the Replicas that had moved up were killed in a high yield explosion which detonated just behind them.

The three overwatch Replicas began searching for whoever had deployed the explosive as an Ogre combat drone began to move up. Suddenly the Ogre turned and began opening fire on the Replicas as its IFF tag switched to the one the hostiles were using. The Replicas barely had time to react before phased SMG rounds tore through their armor from behind.

By the time the commander of the forces on the entryway's bottom floor could organize a response, most of the drones were under the control of Saren's force and there was a stealthed attacker setting explosives and ambushing heavy weapons units.

The situation deteriorated further when after the dust cloud had mostly settled a REV8 and a psion cleared the rubble of the airlocks and began to rain death on the defenders.

Aria cursed. "Pull back our people and set off the demolition charges!"

~+~B:F/M~+~

Jack wasn't happy. Alma seemed to be rather unconcerned with the fact she had fainted after destroying the doors of the Afterlife, while he was steadily becoming more certain that working with Seren was the wrong idea. He was all in favor of killing people who were a problem, but killing bystanders, even if they were rioting, didn't seem right. Maybe it had to do with the fact that of rest of the assembled group only Tali was seemingly concerned with such things.

At least _he_ wasn't the moral compass of the group. That would have been worrying. Not that it seemed to matter who the moral compass was since no one paid it any mind.

He sighed and sent another laser blast into a group of Replicas.

"Are you bored, Jack?" Alma asked on their comms from where she stood next to his mech on top of the twisted and torn metal that was the remains of the front entrance's airlocks.

"No," Jack replied, "I'm just annoyed that they pressured you into killing those people."

"I did not mind."

Jack pinched the bridge of his nose, glad the psionic shielding of the mech kept Alma from sensing his annoyance. "I'm concerned with the fact that they view people so callously."

"Do not worry, they deserved to die. I know this because I am the one that consumed their psionic energy," Alma reassured him. "They were hostile to us and would not have hesitated to attack."

Jack sighed again. "Didn't we have something to do with that?"

"They wanted us dead then and that is what matters."

"I…guess?"

Alma, satisfied that Jack understood and would stop worrying over something irrelevant like that, returned her focus to draining the psionic energy of their nearby enemies so that she could gather up enough power to launch another major attack.

Then Tali cried out over the comms, "Aria's trying to set off explosives in the entryway! We need to go through now or we'll be caught outside by her people or in here when her people find a way past what I've done!"

"Right, anything else we should know about to make this more fun?" Jack asked sarcastically.

"I think I saw some Blue Suns outside the concourse with Aria's soldiers."

"A few additional mercs makes all the difference out there," Jack said.

Alma sent out a riptide blast which tore apart a balcony's supports and set it tumbling to the floor. "We shall clear the way forward quickly," she stated as she began to move forward, continuing to pick off individual Replicas or soldiers.

Jack followed, using his mech to both draw fire and take down heavily armored targets. It was tense, in what was only two minutes according to the clock in his REV8, they managed to make it to the sealed doors that led into the main floor of the club.

"They're fighting harder than ever, but I have this and the security systems won't take a moment," Tali told the group.

"I'm glad we brought you along," Kasumi told her after appearing out of thin air behind the girl. "Even I'm not that fast."

Tali nodded and after several tense seconds the doors opened, revealing a club transformed. Tables were overturned, trash littered the floor and Replicas were waiting behind anything that ever even looked like cover. And then dozens of turrets folded out of the floor, walls and ceiling followed by hovering combat drones flying out of hatches that opened in ceiling and walls.

The sound system was still blasting electronic music with bass beats before pausing and an Asari's voice carrying booming through the club. "This is your last dance, Saren"

"Then it's time to bust a move," Jack replied before firing a volley into the main floor as the turrets turned on the defenders and the club was filled with a storm of techno beats and gunfire.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Saren blasted through a club wall screaming and landed in the middle of the dance floor, releasing an explosive burst of biotics on impact and sending Replicas and soldiers flying.

He snarled and opened fire into the surrounding enemies, his handheld weapons and shoulder mounted missiles tearing through the meager cover of the dance floor even as more panels fold up out of the floor to protect the surprised defenders.

When he saw several were behind a continuous row of panels, he Charged through it, knocking them back so he could gun them down.

Behind his helmet he smirked as he continued his rampage. He had been continuously fighting for the past several minutes now and his state of the art power armor had yet to drop below ninety percent kinetic barrier integrity.

When the Replicas and soldiers quickly scattered in order to reduce the effectiveness of his charges, he shifted focus to using ranged biotic attacks like singularity. Even if they got through his first kinetic barrier, he had two backups, each just as powerful.

He wanted to draw fire away from his allies so that his own forces could maintain maximum cohesion as long as possible. He'd learned that was better than having to take down enemy bases alone. Not more fun mind, but easier.

Suddenly he was knocked off of his feet and sent crashing through a panel behind him. He rolled and came up shooting at the figure in power armor before him. His opponent's bulky power armor was patterned white and black and was a Batarian design, so Saren guessed that it was probably Aria's Batarian lieutenant, not that it mattered. The armor has thick, heavy, large, and equipped with large rocket jets on its back. In its hands was a large shotgun with a barrel the size of the human child's head.

Saren biotically charged, knocking the Batarian back slightly. Suddenly a warning flashed on his HUD as a large omniblade erupted from the Batarian's left gauntlet and cut into Saren's right hand gun.

Saren snarled and leapt back but the Batarian rocketed forward, leading with his firing shotgun. A bang and Saren's first barrier broke. Saren charged to the other side of the Batarian and whirled, firing his remaining gun and emptying his missile pods while creating his own omniblade for his right hand.

As the Batarian turned, Saren lunged onto his back and shoved his blade into the Batarian's head.

Saren leapt back, smirking as the battle raged on either side of the dance floor.

The Batarian staggered with the hole in his helmet, before spinning and firing the oversized and obviously Krogan shotgun into Saren, knocking down a good chunk of the his second barrier's integrity.

"Fake head, Turian," the Batarian sneered.

Saren snarled. This would take longer than hoped.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Jack found that even with his mech's durability, it was simply taking too much fire, even with the massive distraction what was Saren on the dance floor. With the mech's self-repair both relatively slow and low on material, he couldn't afford to risk letting it get destroyed after it took a hit from an anti-armor rocket.

So he opened the mech and dived out into the firefight. He wasn't psionically strong but he had been taught some neat tricks by the ominous evil voices that were apparently just one entity.

Reaching out with his mind he found a psionic grip on the bar ahead of himself. Then he pulled, launching himself forward as he fired wildly from his SMG. He hit the bar with a grunt and rolled over it, landing next to a Replica. It aimed at him, so he focused on another skill he'd learned and started tearing out its psionic essence. A second later its body fell to the floor headless and Jack experienced a rush of energy.

"Man, now I know why Alma does this so much," Jack said grinning as he psionically gripped his next victim.

After his third, he was laughing maniacally as red sparks danced in his eyes.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Zaeed glared at the dozens of Replicas and soldiers on the left side of the club. Before switching to his trusty assault rifle Anabelle. She had been with him through thick and thin for almost a decade and when he used her, it was practically another limb.

He snapped it up and fired a burst into the head of Replica, sending it down.

He saw Alma step forward. "Stay back, girl," he growled. "You're supposed to hang back!"

She glanced at him before gesturing towards their opponents and unleashing a psionic riptide followed by a blast of force which sent tables, people and bottles flying.

She looked back at him expectantly.

He grunted and kept shooting.

~+~B:F/M~+~

Saren gritted his teeth and he shoved his left-hand omniblade into the Batarian's right arm. He needed to break the Batarian's grip before he crushed Saren's helmeted head.

Before Saren could react, a massive knee plate was driven into is torso's armor, cracking it.

"You can't win," the Batarian taunted.

"You're right, I will," an annoyingly familiar human voice said from behind the Batarian.

As the brute started to turn, a directed explosion went off on his back, detonating his jetpack and sending Saren sprawling on the ground.

Saren shook his head clear and glared up as he tried to stand in his damaged armor. "I had him," he spat out.

Kasumi stood with one foot on the Batarian's smoking corpse with a hand on her cocked hip and he could _feel_ her smirk through her concealing black helmet. "Then I guess I stole you kill, that I'm a kill thief if you will."

He ignored her comment and finished standing. The club was in ruins at this point as hacked turrets and drones helped Saren's team clean up any remaining resistance. The left side was a mess caused by the shredding of the riptide power combined with the force of Alma's regular blasts while the right side was in almost worse shape with most of the corpses headless and a blood-spattered and cackling Jack surrounded by corpses on the far end of the main floor.

Saren, satisfied with the situation, turned back to Kasumi, who was examining the halves of the Batarian lieutenant's shotgun. She glanced at him and explained, "Wrex would have liked this."

"Too bad," Saren replied. "Now we need to go down."

~+~B:F/M~+~

Having been given the green light to go all out, the director of the research and development division decided to release their combat oriented experiments in an attempt to sew further chaos. The beings were mostly either natural monsters from around the galaxy or necromorphs, all of which had been biologically and cybernetically enhanced.

Those creations with which it was feasible were then painted with the colors and decals of various factions with presences around Omega station, including but not limited to: the Citadel Council, Armacham, Hyperion, the UAC, the Salarian Union, the Illumniati (Reformed), the Catholic Church (Roman, Traditional and Edenic), the Batarian Hegemony, the Patriarchy, the Athemite Order, the Illium Conglomerate, and the Taiidan Empire.

The R and D director smirked. With this false flag operation, there was no way that Umbrella could be stopped in time. There was no way they could fail now!

~+~B:F/M~+~

In Omega, it was uncommon but not unusual for someone particularly unlucky or stupid to wind up dead at the side of a street. Klin, a poor Drell, was used to this and took the occasionally to take advantage of the opportunity to loot corpses and sell the gear to a fence.

So when he saw the corpse of a Turian, he quickly ran over to see what he could take. He saw the Turian's pistol and his experience with the occasionaly corpse informed him that this was likely a suicide. He'd noticed that there had been quite a few of those recently, and while it gave him a bad feeling, he still needed to go about his life.

He had seen a lot of strange things in Omega, but he completely taken off guard when the corpse started twitching after Klin had picked up the Turian's left hand to look at his omnitool.

It would however be one of the last things he saw on Omega.

~+~B:F/M~+~

A/N: Sorry if the action scenes seem a bit short. I had trouble writing them. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. Next chapter is Aria versus the Team.

~+~B:F/M~+~


End file.
